Zombos Says: Excellent
Poor Zombos. Another birthday has come and gone, another year much older. He is now at that nonretractable age where the over-the-hill birthday cards are no longer funny, no matter how many humanized monkeys, sun-glassed grandmas, scantily-clad woman, and you’re-not-over-the-hill jokes grace them. The poor fellow is tumbling down that hill at this point. He has entered into that past-tense territory; the somewhat foggy land of blurred memories and time-diluted dreams, where his reminiscences of the good old days bore everyone around him to tears in their constant retelling.
Zimba valiantly tried to cheer him up, and was partially successful when she flipped the TV channels to find King Kong Lives! What a bizarre movie. Zombos was practically on the floor by the time the “big” operation scene came along with Linda Hamilton wielding Land of the Giants-sized surgical instruments to perform open-heart surgery on the ailing ape. When they craned in the mechanical heart the size of a Smart Fortwo car, even Zimba was rolling on the floor laughing.
Zombos went back to his doldrums when the movie ended. I ventured into his closet, looking for something that would put a smile on his face again. Perhaps a bittersweet Don Coscarelli and Joe Lansdale tale of a mummy, an old Elvis Presley, and an older John F. Kennedy pretender, played against the backdrop of fading vitality, unfulfilled dreams, and the inevitable slack time between living hard and sleeping big would certainly cheer him up?
Bubba Ho-Tep is not a great movie but it does come close enough to do the job, like the really good Elvis impersonators. Bruce Campbell is the real Elvis Presley and Ossie Davis is a maybe JFK (as told by him, he was dyed black after the assassination incident), and both elevate this mojo-horror with sentimental charm and simple humorous gumption. The twangy guitar and acoustic drum laden score by Brian Tyler countrify this B-movie appropriately with a bittersweet mood—despairing one minute, glorifying the next.
Terror springs up in the Mud Creek Shady Rest Convalescence Home, where Elvis mopes his time away three stops past his prime. Seems he’s tired of the same old thing, day after day, and wanted out. Hiring Sebastian Haff, the best Elvis impersonator he could find to take over the life he no longer wanted, he hits the road as Haff, while Haff hits the stage as him.
Both men impersonate each other, but it looks like Haff gets the better half of the deal. When Haff overdoses, the real Elvis becomes trapped in Haff’s impersonation. No one believes Elvis when he says he’s the real deal, winding him down on his luck and sending him all alone to Shady Rest.
He’s stiffly glum and ornery, ruminating on what should have worked out right and his famous gyrations are now devoted entirely to using a walker to get around. He also suffers from a humiliating ailment on his little prince. His ego’s deflated so flat it’s detached him from with his surroundings: he lies in bed watching every day transpire in blurry fast motion and odd time slices. People treat him like the unimportant head-case with mutton chop sideburns and sparkling wardrobe old guy he feels like.
It takes a scarab beetle as big as a “peanut butter and banana sandwich,” and JFK, thirty-fifth president of the United States, to get him taking care of supernatural business with gusto.
After more than the usual dead old people go out the front door, Jack tells Elvis there’s a mummy scuttling through the halls of Shady Rest, sucking out the souls of its denizens through their butts. He knows this because he’s seen hieroglyphs in one of the men’s toilet stalls. The absurd discussion between Jack and Elvis regarding the discovery of these “stick pictures on the sh*thouse wall,” and Jack’s simple translation of them, leads both to surmise they have a soul-sucking Egyptian mummy roaming the halls. Jack’s copy of the Everyday Man and Woman’s Book of the Soul leaves no doubt about this.
No one really wants to be in the old-age home; not Elvis, not Jack, not Reggie Bannister, who plays the rest home administrator, not Kemosabe, the senile masked cowboy with toy cap guns, and not even the soul-sucking mummy wants to be there. How he wound up in a Texas rest home is as sadly commonplace as anyone else’s story. Since he’s trapped there, too, he has to take care of business to stay alive, or as alive a mummy can get to.
Coscarelli takes us slowly down the gloomy and empty hallways the mummy, dressed in cowboy duds—a Bubba Ho-Tep as Elvis calls him—roams, but the real horror in this movie isn’t the mummy, it’s the humiliation of old-age and the “always the hopes, never the fulfillments,” regrets as Elvis realizes he has lots of too-late-to-do-anything-now tucked away. There’s enough melancholia to go round for everyone at Shady Rest and Campbell’s narrations of his thoughts and dreams sets the tone against the raspy twang strum of the guitar punctuating the empty spaces between his words mood.
There’s a wonderful Carl Kolchak-bucking-the-odds feeling to this story: two men struggling to overcome their age-related handicaps to fight a supernatural force as uncomfortable in the world as they are. Elvis in his walker and best stage costume, and Jack in his wheelchair and best dress suit confront Bubba Ho-Tep in a fight highlighted by animated hieroglyphic invectives uttered by the mummy, with subtitle translations, and the duos frantic, partially ambulatory, attack aided by wheelchair and guile.
In the current cinema horror cycle where torture and grisly death await most victims and the would-you-like-fries-with-that franchising of stories to over-salted excess burning out the craft and skill of writing memorable, Bubba Ho-Tep is a little gem that should not be missed. Or, as Elvis would say, it manages to “TCB, Baby, TCB.”