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Bruce Campbell IS Elvis. (Quite possibly his best performance.) Ossie Davis IS JFK. (OK, probably not his best but likely his most unexpected.) Don Coscarelli’s direction may not be as idiosyncratic as his Phantasm work but it’s still high quality stuff and his script (based on Joe R. Lansdale’s short story) is first rate too. Not much horror considering the movie is about a soul-sucking mummy and the humor is more character based than one might expect (or want), but hey, in the end the character stuff pays off. It’s even (almost) moving. I know, I know, you’ve heard all about it. But have you heard Elvis say, “What do I care? I got a growth on my pecker.”

Elvis is still alive in a retirement home? JFK is still alive, in the same retirement home?, and he’s been dyed black? An ancient mummy in cowboy duds is haunting the retirement home these two happen to be sharing, sucking the souls from the weakened living and excreting the waste in the restroom, writing on the stall walls as he poos?!

With the film’s description, it can be all too easy to dismiss it as a high concept throw-away, and it could have so easily fit into that category. Although I am unfamiliar with Joe Landsdale’s work, with the caliber of the others involved combined with the concept that, which if successful, might produce a great horror comedy, the movie was begging to be watched. Don Coscarelli is the man behind The Beastmaster, another film which could easily go wrong, but which skilfully skirted the line between camp and drama to produce one of the few swords and sorcery films that is actually worth watching. Ossie Davis, of course, was one of those character actors whose face was recognizable even for those who might not know his name. But, as, I’m sure, was the case for most people, Bruce Campbell was the main attraction. As one of the actors working today who can get away with playing what is essentially the same character over and over, he can be entertaining to watch even in bad movies. His presence in a movie with such an audacious premise, the movie had to be worth the time, even if subpar. And so I watched, expecting a fun mash of comedy and horror.

But I got neither. Instead, Bubba Ho-Tep provided something much more satisfying, much more poignant, much more affecting without diluting the premise. What Bubba Ho-Tep actually provided was a tender treatise on growing old. The movie begins with Campbell’s impotent Elvis watching as the nubile grand daughter of his recently deceased roommate carelessly rifles through the dead man’s belongings for something of monetary value, dismissing the war medals and photographs that had personal value for the dead man. This portrayal of the indifference of youth to the passions of its predecessors feels like something that could be in an Ozu * movie, and here it is setting the tone for something about Elvis fighting a mummy? But then Elvis tries to force an erection, and the viewer is forced to realize that any expectations coming in to the movie are bound to be wrong.
^{*I apologize about the reference, but I am too ignorant of too many movies to be able to cite another film maker who dealt with the relationships between generations so well.}

During the ensuing hour and a half, there are plenty examples of horror scenes: a beetle tries to attack Elvis in a shot that might have come from one of the Evil Dead movies, there are scenes of the mummy walking down the nursing home’s corridors, his very presence interrupting the flow of electricity to the lights. Likewise, there are comedic moments—the discovery of the mummy’s restroom hieroglyphics, their translations, and the nurse’s interactions with the patients who think they are famous—but neither the horror nor the comedy really rips into the viewer, eliciting neither scares nor hysteria. Instead, both serve to set a mood: the horror elements are used to show the proximity to death of these human beings at every moment; the comic elements to highlight the absurdity of the situation, the absurdity of these folks lives in particular as much as of life in general. When the employees whose task it is to transport the dead show up intermittently to take away the bodies of these “natural” deaths, their self-involvement results in comic moments, but the underlying tragedy of the entire situation precludes any laugh out loud moment; at best we can smirk at the irony, shake our heads and remind ourselves that we, too, haven’t the faintest clue.

If it sounds sentimental, that’s because it is. But Coscarelli knows how to balance competing elements, and there are so many moments which, set to Brian Tyler’s pitch perfect score, provide an opportunity to experience multiple emotions. The sequence when Elvis is telling his story of how he switched places to become a nobody is at once sad (because we know how it will end for the impersonator), joyful (because we see that The king lives) and amusing (because he’s eating a big pie, and his trailer explodes—amusing, not necessarily funny). And the final battle between the forces of good (JFK and Elvis, two larger than life people whose deaths, if they were deaths, shocked the people so much that conspiracies have flourished about both—they are both people who, in a sense, can be said to have triumphed over death, in a way, I suppose) versus the force of Evil (Bubba Ho-Tep, the manifestation of “Death where is thy sting”, a ridiculous, lumbering grim reaper who, nonetheless, strips these people of their lives and, in many cases, their dignity), to me, was powerful in its representation of man’s battle against the inevitable, the hope and hopelessness that suffuses it.

I like this kind of movie, something that reminds me about humanity and entertains at the same time. I probably would have liked it also if it was strictly a horror comedy, but I wouldn’t have liked it as much.