Films: 2000s
(2002) Bubba Ho-tep
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Bubba Ho-tep
Director: Don Coscarelli
Release: 2002
Director Don Coscarelli achieves the same level of atmospheric perfection in his portrayal of the drifting elderly in "Bubba Ho-tep" as he did the shiftless teenager in "Phantasm."
Bruce Campbell plays a fading old man named Elvis, as in Elvis Aaron Presley. In "Bubba Ho-tep," Elvis lives in a rest home in Mud Creek, Texas. His life has gone on for much longer than the world knows and has turned out infinitely more disappointing than he can comprehend.
Sinking into drugs and boredom, Elvis gave up the glamor to become an Elvis impersonator, swapping places with a real impersonator named Sebastian Haff (also played by Campbell). While Elvis got to live out a purer form of his songs on the impersonator's stage, Haff quickly dissolved into his own addiction and died. The contract Elvis signed with Haff, the one that would have allowed Elvis to resume his real life, perished in a freak fire. 
So Elvis soldiered on, until he broke his hip during a performance. The infection that followed put him in a coma for years and now that he has emerged, relegated to the ramshackle rest home in East Texas, no one believes his story. He also suffers a penile tumor. Elvis drifts in and out of sleep, watching his roommate (Harrison Young) die, watching the staff come and go in a kind of fast-forward that blurs one day into the next.
This is neither as absurd nor as grim as it seems in synopsis. Campbell and Coscarelli craft a gentle, sad charm in "Bubba Ho-tep," marked by late-in-the-day humor - sometimes blunt and sometimes crass, but always reverent of the iconic character Campbell plays and always on point. This is a film about the perils of age.
There is more going on at Mud Creek than the King, however. Down the hall, residents are dying, and one other man seems to know something about it.
Ossie Davis is Jack, as in John F. Kennedy. According to Jack, he wasn't killed in Dallas, Texas in 1963 - merely put out of action and disappeared by the government. They took a piece of his brain, and Jack indeed has a scar at the base of his skull. They died him black. They sent him off to live in obscurity.
Elvis thinks Jack is mad, but he needs what Jack knows about the mysterious presence in Mad Creek. A killer scarab beetle ratchets the threat up a notch, and then there's the shambling corpse that's sucking the old folks' souls out their backsides.
Tasteless? Well, at least borderline - but again, the actors and Coscarelli spin gold from what could be some very rotten straw in the hands of another team.
Coscarelli places his characters in a canvas of browns and muted blues. Sunlight is always amber-gold and interior light is always diffuse. This is the half-world of the elderly; soft at the edges.
The speed of film is artfully used. Action speeds along as Elvis drifts in and out of sleep. The monotony of day-in-day-out nothingness races by. Elvis wonders if there is anything to life at all, "other than food, shit and sex." The King of Rock n' Roll is an existential leftover. When his roommate dies, gagging on his own fluids, Elvis finally reaches out for him, but they never make a connection. The space between their beds is an uncrossable void.
As Elvis unfolds, his bio told to the roommates beautiful but callous daughter (Heidi Marnhout), it matters less and less whether or not he is real. And while Elvis doubts Jack's veracity, credibility diminishes in value as their relationship grows (mirroring the audiences to the characters). What Coscarelli tells us in his script and in his direction is that believing in each other's personal mythology is the glue of real relationships.
Bubba Ho-tep (Bob Ivy) is a mummy, a discarded second-rate stage show that washed up in a nearby creek after a tornado. The literal incarnation of death, it uses the rest home as a kind of beehive, eating the souls that are deposited there by worker-bee young people, allowing the supply to replenish and repeating. Jack and Elvis realize they are "small souls," hardly nourishing to the mummy, but that their discarded and unguarded existence makes them easy prey. They make a plan to resist.
As they return to life, planning and preparing for their confrontation, Elvis feels his physical body resuscitate. His penis begins to work again, his sense of self and independence manifest once more. Like the Lone Ranger-garbed Kemosabe (Larry Pennell), a resident who lives entirely in a fantasy of childhood, Jack and Elvis restore their hearts and souls to full size by reenergizing their imaginations. In one scene, late at night, they bond over candy bars - once again two little boys in a kind of self-made fort, telling each other the stories of what lurks in the "woods" outside.
Unlike childhood, however, Coscarelli tells a cautionary tale of limitations. Kemosabe's real heart ruptures more easily than his spiritual ticker. Elvis and Jack watch him die on the hallway floor after a close brush with (Death) Bubba Ho-tep. The trick, the two realize, may be to go down with guns blazing - with the mythological life firmly pulled over the eyes that would otherwise see the drab brown walls and the disinterested (if not complicit) staff.
Davis and Campbell capture magnificently these two dead American icons, pausing at the the threshold of the afterlife with a sudden realization that they regret the life their roles determined. The miss their children, their wives, the lives they could have had, had they been more normal. Together, they leave the rest home for the grounds and encounter Death (Bubba Ho-tep) together, providing each other the tools they can wrestle from a world that no longer pays attention.
The nobility of their cause is both unfettered and rewarded, but also tempered by Coscarelli's apparent thesis that even the most colorful friendships are clunky and slow moving, while the velocity of fate and determination and mortality is great. Jack and Elvis have too little time together. Death creeps and surprises.
"Bubba Ho-tep" is a beautiful love letter to life, a reminder to appreciate the tools and stories that friendship provides before one wishes for more and adds up too little in the dark, by a creek, all too alone.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Bubba Ho-tep, 2002
Jack and Elvis restore their hearts and souls to full size by reenergizing their imaginations. In one scene, late at night, they bond over candy bars - once again two little boys in a kind of self-made fort, telling each other the stories of what lurks in the "woods" outside.
