tek's rating: ½

Bubba Ho-tep (R)
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Bruce Campbell (of whom I'm a fan from everything ever) plays an old guy in a Texas rest home, who may or may not be Elvis Presley. (And there could be no one better to play the King than Bruce Campbell.) Ostensibly he's actually an Elvis-impersonator named Sebastian Haff, who'd been in a coma for 20 years; but Sebastian claims he's actually Elvis, and had traded places with Haff. Meanwhile, Ossie Davis plays another old guy at the rest home. He believes he's Jack Kennedy, and the victim of a plot by Lyndon Johnson. And then there's the mummy (dressed in cowboy hat and boots)... who has been eating the souls of various old people living in the rest home. Elvis and Jack figure out what's going on, and try to stop him. However, that's actually a rather minor part of the movie. The majority of it is Elvis thinking about all his regrets about the past, and lamenting his current circumstances. Which I guess makes for a decent impetus for him to fight the mummy... and it was vaguely interesting in its own right, but for the most part I just thought it made the movie drag a bit. (Though others might quite reasonably have the exact opposite reaction: that the mummy was the bad part that derailed an otherwise good movie.)

I dunno what else to say. The movie's kind of amusing, but not enough for me to call it a comedy. And the mummy isn't around enough for me to call it a "scary" or "supernatural" movie, per se. Mostly I just thought it was weird, but in a good way. Because I mean, obviously Campbell and Davis aren't going to do a bad movie. Right? I enjoyed the bizarreness of the whole thing. (So I originally put my review under "weird," though I later moved it to the B-movies section. Later still, when I broke up my "scary" section int subgenres, I also included a link to it in "comedy horror.") The premise alone is enough to make the movie worth watching, and the performances were good. I can't say I was ever bored during the movie, but for a lot of it, I felt something akin to boredom, something that probably would have become boredom (or worse), if this were anything other than a Bruce Campbell movie. It's the kind of thing that's best enjoyed if you're already a Campbell fan, I think. So, yeah, I enjoyed it... but I don't think I'll ever feel the need to watch it again.


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