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Page 1 of 2  Bubba Ho-Tep is so much more than it appears to be on the surface. When you say the plot out loud it sounds beyond ridiculous: Elvis (Bruce Campbell) is actually alive and living in a nursing home in East Texas because, back in the Seventies, tired of the pressures that come with being a cultural icon, he had switched lives with an Elvis impersonator just to take a break. The impersonator died and Elvis got stuck in his impesonator’s life…which was okay, because he felt free again, revitalized. A tragic accident that broke his hip also left him in a coma for twenty years. Now, old and broken with a rickety hip and a cancerous growth on his penis, he whiles away in bitterness and self pity in the Shady Rest nursing home.
While there, he and a patient who thinks he is John F. Kennedy (Ossie Davis – yes, that Ossie Davis) have to do battle with a four-thousand year old mummy in order to save their souls and the souls of the patients in the nursing home. Ridiculous, right? Well, yes, it is. But it is a truism of art that comedy is someone else’s pain and that’s never truer than it is in this movie. Bubba Ho-Tep is funny, you laugh at and with it, but it’s also sad and horrifying. At its most fundamental then, Bubba Ho-Tep is a metaphor for old age. Bubba Ho-Tep was adapted by Don Coscarelli, (the prime mover behind the Phantasm series) from a novella of the same name by multiple Bram Stoker award winner, Joe R. Lansdale. It is a strange story, no question, but stories of old people always are. You think, “that would never happen to me” or “I’d rather die first”—but it does and you don’t and the next thing you know, your real life has disappeared into memory. It is a deeply disturbing situation Elvis finds himself in. Trapped in an old folks home with people who have lost their motor skills or faculties or both, people who no one cares about, people who Elvis feels he must be different from, is harrowing. If everybody around you is crazy, what does that make you? In fact, the way the story is set up, initially you just believe that the man in question is Elvis, because that’s the premise. Over time however, it becomes a question: is this Elvis, or is it actually Sebastian Haff, the impersonator Elvis supposedly switched bodies with, suffering from a protracted delusion, a scenario that is much more likely? Either circumstance is almost unbearable in the depth of its pathos. He’s just that nuts or he’s just that trapped. On the movie’s own terms then, it is almost logical that the bad guy would be a four-thousand year old mummy, the very embodiment of the ravages of time. When Elvis and JFK fight the mummy it’s not for their lives, death is inevitable—perhaps even desirable-- but for their souls, their dignity, their sense of self-worth, and their knowledge of who they are. One can imagine Lansdale, when originally conceiving the story, sitting at his desk with his keypad smoking, saying to himself, “that’s so crazy it just might work.”
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The fact that it is Elvis locked in this battle with a grotesquely perverted Father Time emerges as an emotional investment shortcut. You don’t have to have been an Elvis fan to be aware of his iconic status, to know something about him, to have some connection. His music, his look, the way he talks, even the way he died(?) are all so completely woven into the fabric of contemporary American culture as to be inseparable. The movie has very little to do with Elvis as a person at all. It is much more grounded in the myth of Elvis that we have agreed on collectively. For instance, Brian Tyler’s original music doesn’t sound anything like Elvis’ music. Not really. It does, however, feel like the music of the Elvis legend. It’s attuned to the Elvis in our mind, the Elvis that has been twisted and shaped by popular media: movies, books, television, gossip magazines, the Internet and of course, forty years of Elvis impersonators. When Elvis is grousing about his ex-wife, we know who he’s talking about. There’s a connection there. When he’s agonizing over his daughter who he hasn’t seen in years, we have a mental picture of who he means and an emotional response. This could be cheap and cynical but in the hands of Lansdale and Coscarelli, it makes for a deeply human work of art. 
| Likewise, the performance by Bruce Campbell works on the same level. He doesn’t “become” Elvis any more than Ossie Davis “becomes” JFK. Making the audience go “Wow, he looks and talks just like Elvis!” isn’t the point. If anything, Campbell’s performance goes deeper, the viewer responds to it on a more visceral level. Campbell takes the legend of Elvis and gives that flesh and blood life. He’s not showing us the real Elvis, he’s showing us something much more personal…ourselves. That’s our glamorous vision of who we are as a people that has a tumor on the head of its limp dick. All of our clichés, half-remembered stories, legends, lies, not just of Elvis but about much that defined the identity of the American psyche in the Twentieth century is brought to the surface here. That Campbell somehow manages to make this concept not just manageable but poignant is a testament to his ability and to his guts. His Elvis is the most terrifically courageous character in recent film history. Irascible, acidic, desolate, Elvis is a beaten man. He’s old, almost completely alone—his only ally is a deranged man who thinks he’s John F. Kennedy-- his hip is trashed, he’s got cancer on his cock and he needs a walker to get around. When “Bubba” Ho-Tep/Father Time comes calling, it is in this condition that he goes out to meet him. In Campbell’s hands this makes perfect sense. It doesn’t feel like something the script told him to do. It feels like the only choice Elvis can make.
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Campbell and his fans have long defined him as the king of camp, a B-movie legend. Certainly, this may be true enough. The hope here is that this status won’t keep his work in Bubba Ho-Tep from being recognized by a larger and more mainstream audience. I don’t think there is a mainstream movie star who could pull off the magic trick that Campbell does here. Elvis in his jumpsuit days is camp, but Campbell doesn’t need to play that. He just lets it exist. Another actor would have felt the need to wink at the audience, to let them know that they too, are in on the joke. Campbell, secure in his craft, concentrates on making the legend a man.
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