That's All Right, Mummy
reviewed Sun, 26 Oct 2003
So
I’m on a bus, cruising down the street in Portland, on my way to see Once
Upon a Time in Mexico at a cool, historic theater
that serves food and alcohol, and suddenly it catches my eye from a marquee:
BUBBA HO-TEP. My hand is yanking on the cord to signal
a stop before I know it. See, I’d heard about this Bubba
Ho-Tep a few years ago: Bruce
Campbell playing Elvis, fighting a mummy. Do ya need any more
than that? But the damn movie never came out. Until now!
(This movie theater was probably also historic.
At least, it was extremely old. But it was cheap.)
The story goes that Elvis is wasting away in a heartbreak
hotel of a nursing home, having switched places decades earlier with an
Elvis impersonator (that’s the fella who died on the toilet), his only
friend a fellow resident who insists he’s John F. Kennedy, played by Ossie
Davis. (Yes, that Ossie Davis. “They dyed me
this color!” he sputters. “What better way to hide the truth?”)
Then residents of the nursing home start dying (presumably at a more accelerated
rate than usual), and spooky whisperings and skitterings echo through the
shabby halls. With suspicious minds, Elvis and JFK investigate and
find themselves up against a soul-sucking Egyptian mummy (with minion scarabs,
which JFK initially mistakes for a different threat – he tells Elvis after
spotting one of the giant bugs, “He was an ugly bastard, scuttling across
the floor. I think it was Lyndon Johnson”).
So, yeah, funny premise, and Campbell and Davis have
some good comic moments, as does Ella Joyce as their no-nonsense nurse…
but overall, it’s a bad, stupid movie. For a flick about Elvis and
JFK fighting an undead mummy, it’s kinda… dull. It tries a little
too hard to be kooky; I imagine the marvelous weirdness the Coen brothers
could have wrought from this material had they written and directed it,
instead of Don Coscarelli, whose oeuvre consists largely of Phantasm
films and The Beastmaster. And the movie dwells entirely too
much on the nether regions – and I don’t mean “of the occult world,” but
“of men’s bodies” (and what comes out of them).
But Campbell makes a first-rate Elvis (with a little
Ash thrown in) with excellent outfits, and if you’re at all a fan of Elvis
impersonators and/or Bruce Campbell, you’ll probably enjoy it. I
guess it’s another case of failing to calibrate my expectations appropriately;
after all, what fevered dreams my mind conjured from the synopsis of “Bruce
Campbell plays Elvis and fights a mummy,” no movie could live up to.
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