ased on an award-winning short story, Bubba Ho-Tep is built on a foundation of several far-fetched notions. The first is that Elvis (Campbell) is alive (though not all that well) and living in a convalescent home in east Texas. According to his story, The King secretly switched places with an impersonator named Sebastian Haff some time before his death in an effort to escape the pressures of fame.
Unfortunately, Haff was just as attracted to the lifestyle of pills, booze and fried foods as Presley himself, and died very publicly in 1977. Having lost the proof of his true identity in a barbecue accident, the real Elvis had to continue making a living impersonating himself until a bad hip forced him to give up the stage altogether. He now languishes in the rest home, lamenting the mistakes of his past and unable to deny his declining health.
Also living in the home is Jack (Davis), an African-American who believes he is President John F. Kennedy. Jack maintains that that his skin was dyed black and his head filled with sand after the fateful shooting in Dallas. Elvis thinks he's crazy, but since Jack is the only one who believes his story, he gives his friend the benefit of the doubt.
One night, Elvis is attacked in his room by a large insect that he assumes to be a cockroach, but which is actually a Egyptian scarab beetle. Already aware of the mysterious happenings, Jack shares his research with Elvis, and the two come to the conclusion that the residents of the home are being preyed upon by an ancient Egyptian mummy who must consume souls to stay live. Together, Jack and Elvis must stop him before he destroys every last one of them.
Conventional filmmaking has left the building
At the risk of stating the obvious, Bubba Ho-Tep is not your typical Hollywood film. From the first few moments, in which Elvis worries about a possibly cancerous growth on his "pecker," to the final battle between the mummy and a walker-wielding King in his trademark studded jumpsuit, it defies the very notion of traditional moviemaking.
The film rides heavily on Campbell's ability to sell his role as the elderly Elvis, which he accomplishes skillfully, in spite of a glaringly amateur makeup job. Though Davis neither acts nor sounds remotely like JFK, his true identity becomes irrelevant by the end of the film. Through the courage of their convictions, Campbell and Davis make the outrageous premise work. The audience believe because they believe.
Coscarelli (who directed the Phantasm series) spends a little too much time establishing the Elvis character and not enough time expanding the underdeveloped mummy aspect of the storyline. Most of the time, the plot shuffles along like the senior citizens around which it revolves, occasionally scurrying through a light action sequence, only to slow down shortly thereafter to catch its breath. The director does employ some interesting time-lapse tricks, however, which deftly illustrate the monotony of life in a nursing home.
On one level, the film can be seen as a condemnation of an age-ist society that callously banishes the elderly to managed-care facilities to avoid facing its own mortality. On another, it's a creepy dark comedy that takes its inspiration from the pages of the Weekly World News. Coscarelli takes his inspiration from a wide range of sources, including Elvis movies (to the extent of recreating nearly shot-for-shot a sequence from the concert film Elvis Live on Tour), horror, mysteries, even westerns, and blends them together into one indefinable but utterly enjoyable cinematic experience.
