PREMIERE.COM REVIEW (posted 9/26/03)



An underrated or distinctively offbeat movie used to have to linger on video store shelves for years before it gathered (besides dust) enough of a following to be marked a cult classic. These days, however—and this could best be blamed on the mainstreaming of eccentricity—some films grow to cult-classic proportions long before their theatrical run is even over. Call it "Donnie Darko Dysmorphic Disorder," a malady in which a movie with a likably gonzo script postures as a cult favorite before it even has a chance to win over audiences. CQ, Being John Malkovich, the Crispin Glover-led Bartleby, and many a hyperkinetic Hong Kong genre flick all suffer from this ailment, and new to the sick bed is director Don Coscarelli’s "Elvis Presley vs. a mummy" horror-comedy Bubba Ho-Tep, based on an acclaimed short story by, ahem, cult novelist Joe R. Lansdale.

With the aid of jowly prosthetics and a fierce set of muttonchops, Bruce Campbell, the bona fide king of B-movies, gives his greatest (and most entertaining) performance to date as the King of Rock ’n’ Roll himself, now a cantankerous old fart dying ungracefully of penis cancer in an East Texas nursing home. Elvis, having traded lives with an impersonator during the early 1970s to escape the limelight, now relies on a walker to putter around, spending his remaining days ruminating on his legacy, his mortality, and his life-long regrets (i.e., never making peace with his family).

Nobody seems to notice that Mud Creek’s elderly patients are expiring at an alarming rate. That is, until Elvis manages to fight off a terrier-sized scarab beetle (a second cousin to the beastly bug from Coscarelli’s Phantasm) and convince his new friend Jack (Ossie Davis, who believes he is JFK, dyed black by the conspiratorial "they") that something screwy is going down. Through Hardy Boys-ish detection, the tag team of iconic oldsters works to piece together the plot of a soul-sucking mummy making easy prey of the slow-moving retirees, finding clues in mythology books and mysterious bathroom graffiti written in hieroglyphs. The two even have a showdown against an undead cowboy (mummies wear hats?), and you had better believe it’s a crowd-pleasing moment.

The most glaring problem with this insta-cult-classic is that, in all of its linear three-act plotting, the film feels like it was only inflated to two-thirds capacity. Coscarelli’s direction is appropriately subtle and poignant for such a knowingly eclectic premise (even the scatological bedpan humor is handled with as much refinement as that allows), but somehow there doesn’t seem to be a genuine climax. Relying on quirkiness to offset its weakly drawn horror conventions, Bubba Ho-Tep is, at the very least, a wildly creative amusement, thanks mostly to Campbell, whose weathered yet still-taking-care-of-business Elvis is alone worth the price of admission.

—Aaron Hillis