Bubba Ho-Tep review (1 Viewer)

[Mike Monti]

Bruce Campbell will be at the Angelika (New York) this weekend for the Bubba Ho-Tep premiere. He'll be at the 7:00 7:50 and 9:00 shows (per the Bubba Ho-Tep site) I've bought my tickets already.

 

[Max Knight]

This movie was brilliant! One of the funniest films I've seen in a long time. I really hope it gets picked up for a wider release. Hopefully we will see a dvd in the near future, as this is an absolute must have!

 

[teapot2001]

It seems like Bruce Campbell will be making appearances at each of the theaters showing the movie. He was in Irvine today for 2 of the showings and was headed to San Diego aftewards.
"Eat the dog dick of Anubis, you asswipe!"
~T

 

[Rob Lutter]

Why nowhere in Florida? :frowning:

 

[Benson R]

Was anybody here at the screening at the Angelika last weekend? I was sitting next to the guy talking on the cell phone that Bruce swiped at the 9:15 show.

 

[Max Knight]

This movie can't come to DVD fast enough for me. I absolutely loved it!

 

[Al Stuart]

I saw it last week at the Angelika. Here's what I thought.

Sometimes you go into a movie really wanting to like it and hoping and praying that it lives up to the hype. It's really hard not to like Bruce Campbell and you root for the movie to build into a grand horror-comedy masterpiece. The humungous 3-D lettering of the title card implies something that will make steps in that direction. But the movie is actually more of a lazy comedy with the occasional shock cut, and a dark humored treatise on aging. Campbell is amazing as either an Elvis impersonator in a rest home, or actually Elvis pretending to be an impersonator so he wouldn't have to deal with the pressures of fame. The old age makeup isn't even really that well done, but he is as good as he was in Evil Dead 2, which contains the greatest performance by an actor ever committed to film, during one 45 minute stretch. It's kind of sad that Campbell won't actually get any attention award wise, because he's really touching in a part that is both a caricature and a real human being. It could have easily turned into a 90 minute fat old Elvis joke, especially if it played towards Campbell's strengths at being goofy. And if Campbell hadn't been amazing, the movie would fall apart. That's because there isn't much material around him. The majority of the film is Campbell sitting in bed either creatively doling out the exposition (the only movie I've seen with more exposition is The Frighteners) or complaining about the infection on the tip of his penis. That sounds awfully limited and indeed, there is a propensity for director Don Coscarelli (who co-wrote this movie and also made the Phantasm series, which is why this is closer in style to those films than to ED II) to rely on low humor for cheap laughs, but since a lot of it is very funny, especially the way it is played, it doesn't really matter. There is a strong point made about the fact that the way old people are looked upon, is that anything they say is either cluelessly cute or just plain clueless, so even if they make sense or are trying to get something important across, it's easily dismissed. That helps out the humor, because it adds a bitterness to it, that would be missing if it were simply an excuse to concentrate on the scatological. Ossie Davis plays JFK, or at least he claims to be, constantly suggesting that they had to fill his head with sand because of the portions of his brain he lost during the Dallas shooting. He's more of a clownish figure than Campbell, but you find that it doesn't really matter whether or not you believe either of them are who they claim to be, because you can see how it both might be true and a complete figment of their imagination as a way to escape the doldrums and day to day sadness of living in a low rent nursing home.

90% of the movie takes place in the nursing home, and you can see how effectively Coscarelli used his money. The effects are never on screen long enough to clearly see, and when the low rent work may be evident, he plays it more for humor, but still manages a few jumps. The mummy (who has come to steal the souls of the residents), as it appears, is frightening precisely because you can't see it, but as is the nature of such a creature it moves so slowly there is a little less tension. Of course since this is a geriatric horror movie, rather than a teen slasher movie, it doesn't seem idiotic that the heros can't run away fast enough, especially when they require a walker and/or a wheelchair. Which brings to mind the final fight, which is not particularly well staged, especially because the big moment doesn't make a lot of sense, unless Campbell suddenly acquired The Force, and had the ability to make things move on their own. The rules of the horror elements are not well sketched out, and there is a lot of skimming over the details. But the ending is oddly poetic and moving despite some cheap laughs amidst the horror involving enormous hieroglyphics. The thing to remember is that despite being barely over an hour and a half, it is very slowly paced and feels a lot longer. This is at odds with what people expect from a horror movie, but this film has its own herky jerky rhythms, which you either accept or you get fidgety.

I'm curious as to how other people felt considering the way the movie was built up. Was it disapointing because you weren't expecting that kind of movie? Oh and some people might notice that Ossie Davis' room seems to be decorated like a faux Oval Office.

 

[Michael Reuben]

Thanks for that thoughtful review, Al. For all of its interesting features, I think the movie's a failure, because it's fundamentally incoherent. Coscarelli demonstrated with Phantasm that he could handle a plot that never quite makes sense, but there he had a solid "through line" (trying to escape The Tall Man). No such thing saves Bubba Ho-Tep. The monster is off-screen and out-of-mind for long stretches of the film, while Campbell's Elvis narrates his story (or delusion, depending on your point of view). If the movie feels long and leisurely, it's because most of it plays like a lengthy setup, and just after the action finally gets started, the film is over.

Campbell is amazing. A story about the Elvis character, with no monster, would have made a much better film.

M.

 

[Lyle_JP]

I just saw it this weekend at Berkeley's California Theater. All I can say is... WOW! I expected the humor (from Campbell), the low-rent but lovingly done horror (from Coscarelli), but what I didn't expect, and was blown away by, was the humanity and sentimentality conveyed in Both Campbell's and Davis's performances. The scene where Campbell chews the nurse's head off after being treated like a child one too many times left the theater in stunned silence. This is not the all-goofy Bruce of the Evil Dead films; he dug deep here.

This was the best film I've seen all year. I hope it makes enough money so that Bruce and Coscarelli can finally make "Phantasm's End". Anyone living in the Bay Area has no excuse not to see this film before Thursday!

-Lyle J.P.

 

[Larry Talbot]

I'm just glad that Coscarelli seems to have finally made another good movie after Phantasm, one of my all time favorite horror films. He's made nothing but dreck since then. I read an interview with him once where he said much of Phantasm's inventiveness (the jump cuts, etc) were forced by the film's low budget...Maybe having a low budget is good for him.

 

[paul_v]

Ebert has reviewed it giving it 3 stars:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert...-bubba17f.html
Here's an excerpt:
I said the movie doesn't work. And so it doesn't. How could it work? It doesn't work as a horror movie because Bubba Ho-Tep monster would make Ed Wood's monsters look slick by comparison. It doesn't work as a cult movie because it challenges the cleverness of the audience instead of congratulating it. It doesn't work as a traditional story arc because the story jumps the rails when Bubba Ho-Tep turns up.
But it does sort of work in one way: It has the damnedest ingratiating way of making us sit there and grin at its harebrained audacity, laugh at its outhouse humor, and be somewhat moved (not deeply, but somewhat) at the poignancy of these two old men and their situation. Elvis asks himself how in the world the King of Rock and Roll ended up in a rundown East Texas nursing home with a boil on the family treasure, and by the end of the movie he has answered this excellent question more amusingly than any reasonable moviegoer could have expected

 

[FredHD]

I'm really excited because I get to go see it Thursday night at the Deep Ellum Film Festival. Can't wait!!!!

 

[George See]

I can't wait to see this, it's not playing anywheres near me and no scheduled DVD release, but one day...

 

[Todd Terwilliger]

Saw it, loved it!
"By the unblinking red eye of Ra!"

 

[Estevan Lapena]

I REALLY want to see this film! When well this thing get released in Vancouver!

 

[Alex Spindler]

Finally saw this.
Quite amusing, and I find I'm liking it more in retrospect than I did while leaving the theater. There is some great comedy in here, and some of the lines are just excellent. It's too uneven to be truly great though (the hearse drivers fell flat every time for me). However, no other actor could do this than Bruce Campbell. He was perfect as Elvis.

 

[Malcolm R]

Interesting. This film will be coming to little 'ol Vermont on January 23. Perhaps a road trip is in order.
February 13, 2004 - at the Tinseltown 12

 

[Ross Williams]

I saw this quite a while ago, last May at the Seattle Film Festival. It was way too hyped up for me at that point. I love Bruce Campbell and cheesy horror flicks, so I was dying to see it.

Once the film got rolling, I could feel myself forcing me to enjoy it. I don't know if I've ever seen a film try so hard to be a cult film. Instead of enjoying it for what it was, I started to pick it apart. Afterwards I was quite disappointed. Only Bruce's fantastic performance as Elvis stood out.

Seven months later, I'd like to see it again. I think I was expecting way to much the first time around. I don't think I will have a complete turn around in opinion, but I think I may be able to enjoy on another level.

 

[Shawn_KE]

I saw this a couple weeks ago, but still have mixed feelings about it. I like Bruce and he was great as The King, and I really like Joe R Lansdale's work, especially his Subway Jack Batman story from a while back.

But I really didn't feel anything for the movie after it was over. Sure I laughed at a lot of the lines and thought the performances were great, but the film didn't give me anything like Evil Dead movies did. Like above, it seemed like it tried to hard to be a cult film. Kinda a forgettable film to me, and I really hate to say that.

 

[Andy Sheets]

Like above, it seemed like it tried to hard to be a cult film.

I think comments like this are interesting because to me the film actually went in the opposite direction, stubbornly refusing to be a "cult film" even when it would have been so easy to do so. The main exception would be the scene of Elvis battling the scarab beetle, which definitely leaned more toward Army of Darkness in how it came off, but there's too much actual emotion and poignance in the rest of the movie for it to fit in with the typical Crowd-Pleasing Bruce Campbell Flick.
Then again, maybe my view of the movie is colored because I've also been a Joe Lansdale fan for a long time, and since I've read the original short story, I knew exactly what to expect from the movie, which is basically Lansdale's writing with just a few embellishments to get it up to standard movie length. That's probably the movie's biggest weakness - simply having to stretch out a story that was pretty slight in the first place. But as a fan of the writer, it was a real treat to hear Joe's dialogue spoken by Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. I was very happy with the movie
Now if only someone would hurry up and adapt Cold in July and The Two-Bear Mambo...