Bubba Ho-Tep

2002 horror comedy

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Elvis, after exchanging identities a long time ago with one of his many impersonators, is living out his final years in a rest home that just happens to have an Egyptian soul-sucking mummy attacking its inhabitants. John F. Kennedy, now a black man, arrives and the iconic duo team up to fight the titular mummy thing.

The novelty fades away after the first fifty minutes of this, but it's really difficult to not like a movie about an elderly Elvis and a black JFK, the former with a penis that doesn't work and the latter with "a bag of sand back there [in his head]." Ossie Davis is so good here in a role I bet he never thought he would play. "I'm thinking with saaaaand here." The "Shit, that ain't gonna stop him" response to Elvis's "President Johnson's dead" line. It's a performance that should be nothing but stupid, but Ossie brings this cool class to it and makes something that shouldn't work actually work. And I'm going to go ahead and call Bruce Campbell's Elvis brilliant because it's my blog and I'm allowed to type anything I want. He manages to balance all the Elvis cliches and some real humanity. Campbell's Elvis is human and broken with a penis that doesn't work, so you end up feeling for the character in a way that's surprising, even when he says lines like this one: "Do I look like an ickyologist to you? Big ol' bugs--bugs as big as a peanut butter and banana sandwich. What do I care? I got a growth on my pecker." Bruce also gets to show off his action superstar chops with an Elvis vs. "bitch cockroach" accompanied by rockin' guitars. Unfortunately, that aforementioned novelty does wear off eventually, and all those flittery sound effects and whooshy sounds with quick shots of random stuff got a little old. The final thirty minutes of this just isn't very good, and the biggest problem might be that that titular antagonist isn't memorable, iconic, or interesting. There is a cool scene where the mummy's moving through the strangely-lit hallway though. My favorite scene is a conversation between our two heroes where there's this big dramatic movie music that leads to Kennedy asking, "Would you like a Ding Dong?" When that's more thrilling than the climactic fight this builds to--a battle between a couple old guys and an uninteresting mummy--it's probably an issue. But seriously, Bruce Campbell is really good in this.