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Rating:
Having devoured a good part of the Hap & Leonard series hasn't quenched my thirst, so I started reading several novels and now I'm waiting. Waiting for this phase of infatuation to pass, for rationality to descend and let me see some cracks in this style of writing that seems so brilliant and flawless to my eyes. I've been waiting for a year. If I met him, I mean Joe, I would warmly shake his hand and in the distraction of the moment, try to snap it off. Who knows, maybe by induction, I could get a bit of his talent by pressing the keys with fingers still dripping. Naaa, this Texan is also a martial arts enthusiast, and so it's quite likely that he'd snap my hand from my wrist instead. He would look at it questioningly, tilting his head like a dog, and before leaving it there on the roadside, he might scratch his ass well with it or simply use it to open a Dr Pepper.
I was at the letter B when I stumbled upon his name in a row of DVDs. Then on the poster, at the top right, was the name Bruce Campbell. That's enough. A Lansdale story portrayed onscreen by one of my youth icons is something worth the handful of euros required!
An aged Elvis languishes in a nursing home. Lifting the sheets, he looks at his diseased and now lifeless member, possibly cancer, which must be massaged daily with cream by a nurse who barely contains her retching during the procedure. To him: the King of rock! There were women who would have killed to be in that nurse's shoes, but now it seems that time has gone down the drain of the worst toilet in the world, and someone has kicked it into the ass-hole of nothingness. A mirror in hand reveals wrinkles on his nearly unrecognizable face, deep enough to hide a couple of Tremors inside. The only person who believes he’s really Elvis and not a crazed impersonator is JFK. You remember that crackling afternoon in Dallas in 1963. The people of the nursing home, truth be told, consider him mad, and that's just because he's black, and John, well, was not. But even Elvis was supposed to have been dead for decades, and yet he's right there, with his decomposing dick.
Yes, Giacobbo would have dived into this story.
Perhaps instead of the Egyptian Mummy that sucks and shits out the elderly souls of the hospice, he would have put Loch Ness as the antagonist, crawling out of the residents' toilets, but let's not deviate too much; I wouldn't want you to get confused. The plot in "Bubba Ho-Tep", as you may have understood, is important.
The film's budget is ridiculous and this factor, needless to deny, weighs heavily. All the filming was done within a 100-meter radius, and the hyper-accelerated ending seems more dictated by running out of cash than by the director's frenzy. The soundtrack consists practically of a single original song whose strumming, perfectly spot on like winning the lottery, accompanies almost all the scenes, gifting them with a western epicness.
It's a film that's fun beyond any rosy expectations and almost moving given the means at disposal. A few blind people, evidently under the influence of alcohol and a train, managed to define the work as a horror comedy despite the level of tension being deliberately close to absolute 0. On the contrary, the strength of "Bubba Ho-Tep" lies in the whirlwind script: a swirl of crap in which Lansdale has thrown a strong vein of real damn melancholy. The beginning, with the image of the semi-destroyed King of rock on a bed looking at his withered member as a mirror of his decline, approaches the adjective "genius". The nursing home setting and its residents obviously make you chuckle, but also think and burst into very bitter and cynical laughter. The second factor elevating the work is the brilliant idea of excessively emphasizing the obsessive slowness of the protagonists (see the frame I wanted to put as a poster) and the story in stark contrast to every action/splatter/horror movie worthy of respect.
Campbell's performance is sumptuous in its being swaggering and melancholic, and the support offered by Ossie Davis is truly of granite quality. I don't want to give a rating. There are parts worthy of jail time alternated with others deserving a bow. Overall, I am happy with the 3.90 euros spent. I don't know, and I don't care much, if it's a cult. Perhaps the line between cult and nonsense is quite thin and subjective in certain junctures.
It certainly isn't every day you can say you've seen an Elvis in a wheelchair setting fire to a soul-sucking Mummy dressed as a cowboy.
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