Bubba Ho-tep

This review contains spoilers.
Was mildly disappointed with this film (USA 2003), which both in reviews and its first on-screen hour promised to hold some sort of insight into human truth, or at least some very entertaining camp horror via the Bruce-Campbell-as-Elvis in a Texas nursing home teaming up with Ossie-Davis-as-JFK to battle an Egyptian mummy narrative.

Some nice character development and some interesting background plot to the true story of what happened to Elvis. Especially liked the scene with Bruce Campbell as the Elvis impersonator, dribble of purple berry pie on his chin as the real Elvis (also B. Campbell) offers to switch places with him, historically. It was the one moment in the film with the facial expressions the man (B. Campbell) is famous for, where verbal dialogue recedes and the camera pulls in on the physical dialogue in the man’s famous chin, mouth, eyes, etc. (interesting aside here, friend I attended the film with mentioned B. Campbell’s got some sort of auto-bio out called The Chin That Could Kill, or something great along those lines). But playing the real Elvis in Bubba Ho-tep seemed to offer something new and emotional from Campbell in addition to the Duke Nukem one-liners and rubber face. It actually wasn’t boring just watching him hiked up on his elbow in a hospital bed philosophizing over his impotent pecker for the first half of the film. And Ossie Davis brought a lot of dignity to his role and the film.
And so we’re obviously also expecting to forget all this development and critical eye and just you know enjoy watching an elderly Elvis with a cancerous unit toddling around with an aluminum walker alongside an Afro-American JFK buzzing in an electric wheel chair, squishing giant cockroaches (not explained, the cockroaches) and at first trying to figure out how to kick a cowboy mummy’s ass. And so expecting, as the plot structures a phallic and mentally invigorated return of the King, to get some nice climactic scenes of undead heads rolling under the blaze of Elvis’s flamethrowing bug-sprayer (is that what the bugs were for, a plot device for including the flamethrower prop?), all of which sort of peters out narratively and directorially and cool-camera-angle-wise and they just like light the zombie on fire twice and he falls down and everyone has a heart attack, which sounds better in type than onscreen. It didn’t even throw flames, the bug sprayer.
Budget B movie or not, I was expecting something more, at least campier if that was all they could afford financially and creatively. By the end I felt a little taken advantage of, and realized they really played me with the incessant narrative monologue and sweeping drama score, which could have been inverted and taken advantage of more (the drama and character set-up , not me) by curtain time. And I really liked the gun-slinging Kemo Sabe, a.k.a. Lone Ranger, who seemed so promising especially when he pulled out his cap-guns like a true desperado but instead literally just keels over to become Elvis’s mojo. Again, this now sounds suspiciously a lot better here in type, as it did in the Cinecenta guide.
This being a review, however, my final value judgement for Bubba Ho-tep is still positive for the aftermarket crowd: worth the price of renting with some friends.
Update April 18, 2004:
I had to remove a bunch of the hyphens from a really long compound sentence I had in the first paragrpah…some browsers (Mozilla, IE for Mac I think, etc.) wouldn’t force wrap it, the line, so it made the whole site like expand way out, all horizontal scroll bars, etc.