Bubba Ho-Tep

The premise alone is cinematic gold. It’s the early 21st century and Elvis (a heavily made-up Bruce Campbell) is alive, unwell, and confined to a dilapidated rural nursing home in Mud Creek, Texas, where the residents slurp, gag, and fart during mealtimes and loved ones only come to visit when you’re dead so they can toss your precious keepsakes in the trash. Elvis, alas, has a cancerous growth on his king-of-rock-and-roll penis and wonders how much longer he has in this winnowed world. But is this really Elvis? He claims that back in the day he traded places with an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff, and that it was Haff who died in 1977, yet there’s only one person who believes his story and it’s Jack (the great Ossie Davis), a Black man who claims to be John F. Kennedy. They dyed his skin, Jack explains, so that no one would believe his story and help him in his pursuit of justice. When the nursing home becomes plagued by a reanimated, soul-sucking, ancient Egyptian mummy in a cowboy hat, accompanied by a giant, deadly, scuttling green beetle, Elvis and Jack connect over wee-hour tea and contraband candy bars and devise a plan to vanquish the revenant and his pet, reviving their sense of dignity and purpose in the twilight of their lives.

Rife with low-budget creepiness and imaginative hilarity, Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), adapted from the eponymous novella by Joe R. Lansdale, cemented the cult indie auteur status of writer/director Don Coscarelli, who’d previously made The Beastmaster (1982) and inaugurated the Phantasm franchise in 1979. This story of fallen kings dissipating in obscurity is a tribute to the utility of fantasy: whether either of these elderlies, both likely suffering some gradient of cognitive decline, is who they claim to be has no bearing on the revitalizing force of their friendship and shared determination to rise to the occasion when the evil dead come calling. Campbell and Davis embody their characters with winsome conviction and pathos, while Coscarelli’s obvious affection for his protagonists is enhanced by the care brought to atmospherics and sundry supporting players and scenarios: the gloomy hallways and surrounding woods, the codger who dresses like the Lone Ranger and draws toy pistols on fellow residents, the smoking-hot nurse (Ella Joyce) with the gruff bedside manner of someone numbed after decades of casual abuse by feeble curmudgeons, or the desperate, inarticulate cries of the man in the bed next to Elvis’s, who expires after one last desperate attempt to mutter a plea. The story errs on the side of simplicity and, it must be said, ends twice, both times using the same element. But the film’s charisma is abundant and enduring, and its appropriation of oft-cited cultural icons is genuinely singular. 🩸