bubba ho-tep.

Basic Info: Bruce Campbell as Elvis Presley, Ossie Davis as JFK, Bob Ivy as Bubba Ho-tep,oDirected by Don Coscarelli, Music by Brian Tyler, Based on a short story by Joe R. Lansdale.

Bubba Ho-tep does a brilliant job of presenting a modern-day, very-much-not-dead Elvis dealing with old age. What makes the character of Elvis so powerful, in part, is that the audience already knows his backstory--they just don't know why he isn't dead--so there is no need to explain the people he mentions, keeping inner-monologue plot exposition to a minimum. Because the audience knows this man's story, it makes his fears of being forgotten seem not only endearing, but humanizing. In effect, Elvis becomes Everyman, trying to come to terms with his personal legacy and mortality. Bruce Campbell's performance is spot-on, avoiding the over-the-top tendencies that could easily accompany a role such as this.

The plot is wacky, no doubt about it. An Elvis in his seventies and an African American JFK fighting a mummy with a passion for Western attire may sound like a movie that's too weird to possibly be any good. But it just is. It's poignant, even. The elderly people who populate this East Texas resthome are not all "going gently into that good night," but fighting to retain their personalities and, in some cases, sanity. Sanity, itself, is questioned, even doubted.

The special effects are not state-of-the-art, per say--the mummy is played by a guy (Bob Ivy) in a suit, not another computer-generated "marvel"--but they aren't lacking, either. The mummy looks like a mummy and Bruce Campbell looks like Elvis. Basically, the effects are nothing to rave about, but they are seamless enough that they go unnoticed, in a successful way.

My only real problem with Bubba Ho-tep is the extremely large scarab running around in the beginning of the movie. It's not hard to guess that it's a minion of the mummy, but I didn't feel like it was explained quite enough.

Other strong points of the movie include: the perfect soundtrack, the sub-plot involving a growth on Elvis' penis (which leads to an exploration of sexual deterioration), and the fact that Coscarelli was not afraid to tastefully capitalize on the built-in legend of his main character. The DVD extras include a "making of" featurette that's also fun to watch.