Bubba Ho-Tep

Hang on. What I’m about to tell you is true. Elvis is alive! And so is President John Kennedy! And both of them are old men living incognito in a cheap East Texas nursing home. But that’s not even the most incredible thing. Elvis and JFK have big trouble on their hands because Ho-Tep—a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy in a cowboy hat—is stalking the nursing home at night so he can suck out the souls of its residents. And Elvis and JFK could be next!

That’s the outrageous premise of the 2002 movie Bubba Ho-Tep—an insanely entertaining mix of comedy and horror that originally sprang from the fevered imagination of Texas writer Joe Lansdale, God bless him. If you haven’t read Lansdale’s work, what are you waiting for?  In the case of adapting his Bubba Ho-Tep story into a film, Lansdale was fortunate to catch the interest of director Don Coscarelli, who is famous for his equally feverish series of Phantasm horror films. Together, Lansdale and Coscarelli are an inspired match for tackling a story about “the king of rock and roll vs. the king of the dead.” And the match is made even greater thanks to two great actors who joined the project: Bruce Campbell as Elvis and Ossie Davis as JFK.

It’s all part of the delirious fun.

So what if Ossie Davis is Black? Campbell and Davis are terrific as the nursing home pals. Perhaps like a lot of older folks, they spend their days complaining about constipation, the lousy food they have to eat, and how they wish they had lived better lives when they were younger. Fortunately for them, that Egyptian soul sucker is on the prowl, claiming more lives, and this gives Elvis and JFK a new, common purpose to worry about: how to defeat that damn mummy. And they undertake the mission with gusto.

One of the supreme charms of the movie is that—despite the audacious plot—the story never makes fun of the two men. They are funny as hell, but they are also treated with an equal measure of warmth.  There are even moments of genuine poignance. At one point, Elvis sadly admits: “Get old and you can’t even cuss someone and have it bother ‘em. Everything you do is either worthless or sadly amusing.”

Bubba Ho-Tep is a certified cult movie winner! I give it three-and-a-half-stars out of four. Sure, some of it hits the mark and some of it doesn’t, but that’s to be expected of such a daring and creative high-wire act. It’s utterly fresh and enjoyable, unlike anything else that you’re likely to be force fed by a streaming algorithm. I sure hope they get around to making the long-planned sequel, tentatively called Bubba Nosferatu.