The Return of the King

Comeback special: Elvis (Bruce Campbell) and JFK (Ossie Davis) go mummy hunting.

Elvis lives, barely, in Bubba Ho-Tep.

by Sam Adams

Like a Marvel Team-Up written by Andy Warhol, Don Coscarelli's Bubba Ho-Tep proposes an unlikely alliance between Elvis Presley and JFK, whose legally dead status does nothing to prevent them from joining forces to fight evil. The setting for Coscarelli's tale (taken from a story by Joe Lansdale) is not the afterlife, but a rundown nursing home in Mud Creek, Texas, whose inhabitants are so close to death that no one takes much notice when a 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummy starts sucking the life out of them. No one, that is, except the King.

Elvis, it seems, sought temporary relief from the pressures of fame by swapping places with an impersonator (played, like the man himself, by Bruce Campbell). But his double impersonated Elvis' drug habits along with his stage moves, and the only proof of their deal burned up in an unfortunate "barbecue accident," leaving Elvis Presley no option but to make a living impersonating himself. If you think that's a stretch, wait until you hear what happened to JFK: Instead of being killed in Dallas, he was spirited away, his brain removed and kept in Washington, his head filled with sand. And, oh yes, they dyed him black. "Can you think of a better way to hide the truth?" asks Ossie Davis' Jack. Elvis, for one, cannot.

Though the nursing home also boasts the Lone Ranger among its residents (called Kemosabe for copyright reasons), Coscarelli doesn't treat the interaction between American icons like a pop-cultural joke. Sideburns notwithstanding, Campbell goes light on fat-Elvis cliches, and since no amount of contortion would convince an audience that Ossie Davis is the son of a Boston aristocrat, he doesn't much try. Passing up the obvious jokes means Coscarelli has to struggle to inject humor into the sometimes-slow proceedings, but he finds something that the movie's audience will almost certainly not expect: poignancy. Beneath Bubba Ho-Tep's midnight-movie surface is a surprisingly straightforward look at the pain of growing older. Less concerned with regaining his fame than with finding the strength to get out of bed, Elvis worries most about the daughter he never knew. If she knew he was alive, he wonders, "Would she even care?"

In the best genre movies, such concerns are smuggled in under cover of darkness, but in Bubba Ho-Tep they rarely fuse with the mummy-hunting plot. It's as if the movie contains two stories -- one the filmmakers wanted to make, and one they could get financing for, or perhaps it's just that Coscarelli has been making genre movies so long (his filmography contains precious few movies without the word "Phantasm" or "Beastmaster" in the title) he's incapable of thinking in other terms. The last thing you should be thinking at the end of a movie about a soul-sucking mummy is, "What did they need the mummy for?" Or perhaps especially, "Why was he wearing a cowboy hat?"

Bubba Ho-Tep

Written and directed by Don Coscarelli Starts Sat., Feb. 21 at Prince Music Theater

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