Movie Review: Bubba Ho-Tep

You'll love this movie.  In fact, this 2002 movie has the sort of bizarre appeal that should've made it more popular. 

In this over-the-top, low-budget horror-drama, Elvis takes on the undead.

Bruce Campbell plays a nursing home resident in his 60's who, for many years performed as an Elvis impersonator.  Now he's admitting he really is Elvis, but of course nobody believes him except his friend in the next room, Jack (Ossie Davis).  Jack may believe in Elvis, but Jack also believes he's Jack Kennedy, with a sandbag filling a crater in the back of his skull created by Oswald's rifle and that his skin has been dyed black.

You take your allies where you can and the fact is, there is something in the hallway stealthily robbing the remaining life from the other elderly residents, one at a time.  It's a mummy in a cowboy hat.  Discovering that the creature is from a hijacked Egytian exhibit that went off a nearby bridge and disappeared into the river below many years before, Elvis and Jack agree that they need to take care of business.

Appropriately enough, the tagline is The King vs. The King of the Dead. 

This is an excellent movie, played pretty straight if wild, with a well-scripted story, a premise that pulls you right into it, and a small but able cast.  Campbell and Davis make a great team.  It's shot in an abandoned veterans hospital which stands in for the nursing home with a budget of a half million dollars.

You'll have to watch it just so you can tell other people you watched a movie about Elvis kicking a mummy's butt.  Serious: you gotta see it.  It's great.

The DVD has a bunch of extras on making a mummy, costumes, music, and, of course, a making-of featurette.