"Even a big bitch cockroach like you should know... never, but never, fuck with the King."
Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)
Directed By Don Coscarelli
The most surprising thing about Don Coscarelli's Bubba Ho-Tep is how poignant it proves to be.
Given that this is a film with BRUCE CAMPBELL playing Elvis (!) who fights a souls stealing mummy (!) with the aid of Ossie Davis who plays JFK (?), I think it was fair to assume that this film would be a knock-about comedy in the vein of Evil Dead 2. Well I couldn't have been more wrong! This is a melancholy film, coloured with loneliness, regret and keen sense of mortality.
Bruce Campbell plays the king as a sick frustrated old man, but this makes him all the more heroic as he decides that he's the only one who can save his fellow rest-home patients from immortal evil. (Well, he and his best friend, elderly African American JFK, that is.)
This is not to say that the film has no humour, it's just that the laughs are in the dark sardonic vein of author Joe R. Lansdale, the writer of the original short story. Anyway both Campbell and Davis give strong, moving performances and Coscarelli, as usual, spins, atmospheric gold out of a tiny budget.
Terrific little film and a welcome addition to it's director's strange and utterly personal filmography.
Given that this is a film with BRUCE CAMPBELL playing Elvis (!) who fights a souls stealing mummy (!) with the aid of Ossie Davis who plays JFK (?), I think it was fair to assume that this film would be a knock-about comedy in the vein of Evil Dead 2. Well I couldn't have been more wrong! This is a melancholy film, coloured with loneliness, regret and keen sense of mortality.
Bruce Campbell plays the king as a sick frustrated old man, but this makes him all the more heroic as he decides that he's the only one who can save his fellow rest-home patients from immortal evil. (Well, he and his best friend, elderly African American JFK, that is.)
This is not to say that the film has no humour, it's just that the laughs are in the dark sardonic vein of author Joe R. Lansdale, the writer of the original short story. Anyway both Campbell and Davis give strong, moving performances and Coscarelli, as usual, spins, atmospheric gold out of a tiny budget.
Terrific little film and a welcome addition to it's director's strange and utterly personal filmography.
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