Bubba Ho-Tep
dir. Don Coscarelli
Silver Sphere Corporation

Nowadays "cult" is less of a status and more of a genre. Much like "summer blockbuster" before it, a "cult" film can be designed as such from the get-go. The only convincing you should need is the pitch for Bubba Ho-Tep: Cult horror director Don Coscarelli (Phantasm) and cult horror actor Bruce Campbell (Evil Dead trilogy) team up for a film about an elderly Elvis (Campbell) and an equally aged black man who thinks he's JFK (Ossie Davis) teaming up to defend their Texas rest home from an evil soul-sucking mummy.

Bubba Ho-Tep is clearly meant to be Campbell's movie, and much of the action centers on Elvis and his attempts to redeem himself from his fallen state. (Y'see, it was an impersonator that died, after switching places with him, so now he's just another guy who thinks he's Elvis.) Despite Campbell's pedigree, there is surprisingly little monster-slaying action in the film. In fact, up until the final confrontation, the movie is mostly Campbell as Presley mulling over his fate in the form of voiceovers and flashbacks. While you'd think this would be a deeply boring direction for a mummy movie to take, his delivery is so funny and genuinely poignant that you're more likely to wonder what it would be like if these flashbacks made up the entire film. They give the character a surprising amount of humanity, a pleasant bit of depth for a film that seems at first to be trying too hard to be weird.

That's not to say the mummy bits aren't entertaining. Their humor, though broad, is a lot of fun and charmingly goofy (Elvis duels a giant scarab with a bedpan, for instance), and these scenes provide for the funniest interactions between Campbell and Davis.

It is these performances that make Bubba Ho-Tep more than just a wacky concept. Campbell turns in the best performance of his career, playing the aged King with a seamless blend of bravado, ennui and the tragic nobility of a fallen monarch — a resilience to whatever further indignity life might throw at him, even if it takes the form of a centuries-old undead mummy. Davis fills the slightly mad mentor role, providing a hyperactive foil to the deadpan Elvis. JFK and Elvis were on opposing sides of society's ideological spectrum — liberal politician and conservative rock star — and both held (and still hold) positions of great influence on the minds of Americans. Yet both led lives ripe with scandal and public disgrace. In the movie, Elvis tries to run away from it all; though he is happy living the lie for a while, he eventually winds up, quite literally, as a pale imitation of himself. Compare this to "Kennedy's" maniacal obsession with the conspiracy theories about his own murder, and it is clear that both characters have lost themselves in their own negative stereotypes. Instead of reveling in dreams of their "better days" they have become fixated on their worst. With this in mind, the appearance of the mummy seems much less arbitrary: What better enemy to threaten a couple of has-been American heroes than a foreign, badly preserved monster who has, through countless parodies and B-horror flicks, been as shamelessly robbed of its bite as they have?

When our heroes finally decide to do something about their situation, the combination of the two in action combines superhero team-up comics with those cop movies where the aging protagonist with a decorated and heroic past decides to come out of retirement for one last hurrah. There's a great moment when Elvis and JFK stroll down a hallway in slow motion — Elvis in a white diamond-studded jumpsuit limping with his walker, JFK in a smart black suit riding in his electric wheelchair — that is effective not for its originality (given the nature of the film, such a shot was inevitable), but because of its blend of cheese and gravitas. The two transcend their status as punchlines, as men who were great, once … even if only in their minds. While Davis's character is presented as obviously off his rocker, we never meet anyone besides Campbell who can verify that he is the real deal. But they become heroes again, and it's hard not to forget how silly it all is and cheer for them.

In other words, once you get past the title and the offbeat concept, it's easy to fall for this insistently weird B movie. It overcomes its predictability to deliver something that possesses real emotional weight, and proves to be an entertainingly tongue-in-cheek study of American mythology.

— Ryan Vu (traxus4420@hotmail.com)