Today's Cinema Sunday turns to a cult classic that came out in 2002.
Wow! A Cinema Sunday post about a movie that came out this century?
The film for this week's post is Bubba Ho-Tep, a mixture of comedy and horror about a mummy attacking a nursing home.
And all that stands between this shambling undead monstrosity and it's unknowing victims in it's path is... Elvis Presley.
The staff at the Shady Rest Retirement Home in East Texas know their patient as Sebastian Haff. But this elderly man in their care has his own story of who he is and how he came to be there.
So here's the deal,
During the 1970s, growing tired of the demands of fame, Elvis Presley switched places with an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff.
Elvis lived a quiet, happy life while making a living pretending to be himself.
With the death of Sebastian Haff in August 1977 and a propane explosion destroying the only documentation proved this deception, he was unable to return to his old life.
During a performance, Elvis falls off a stage, sustaining a blow to the head which puts him in a coma.
20 years later, Elvis is a guest of the Shady Rest Retirement Home in East Texas where the staff generally humor his "delusion" that he's not really Sebastian Haff but is really Elvis Presley.
Elvis is old and dying of penis cancer. Elvis is just existing, contemplating the failures and mistakes of his life while waiting for death to put him out of his misery already.
That's when the mystery gets his attention.
The strange scurrying beetle is a harbinger of a shambling mummy dressed like a cowboy, feeding on the souls of the residents of the Shady Rest Retirement Home in East Texas.
Elvis and the mummy make eye contact which results in a telepathic flashback on the mummy's life, death and return.
The creature is a re-animated ancient Egyptian mummy stolen during a U.S. museum tour, and subsequently lost during a severe storm when the thieves' bus veered into a river near the Shady Rest Retirement Home in East Texas.
Elvis names the mummy 'Bubba Ho-Tep' and he'll be damned if he will let this mummy continue it's soul stealing mission. Everyone in the nursing home is just waiting to die but there's some hope their souls might go to a better place.
When 'Bubba Ho-Tep' comes calling, the victim is just dead and the soul is consumed.
Elvis has one friend at the nursing home, an African American man named Jack who insists he is President John F. Kennedy.
Jack's story is that after the assassination attempt in Dallas TX where JFK was shot in the back of the head, Lyndon Johnson arranged to have his skin dyed black and abandoned him in the Shady Rest Retirement Home in East Texas.
Well, Jack has got to be crazy, right? But Elvis is trying to convince anyone who will listen that he really is Elvis and not Sebastian Haff. And there is the little matter of the mysterious scar on the back of Jack's head.
Anyway, it's up to Elvis and Jack to save the souls of everyone at the Shady Rest Retirement Home in East Texas and bring an end to Bubba Ho-Tep's deadly mission.
Which will be tricky since Elvis has to use a walker and Jack is stuck in a wheel chair.
Elvis and Jack engage Bubba Ho-Tep with an elaborate plan to destroy the mummy and release the souls he has consumed. The encounter is violent and Jack dies of a heart attack while the mummy fatally cuts Elvis.
But before he can succumb to his wounds, Elvis is able to set the mummy on fire.
Lying outside on the grounds of the Shady Rest Retirement Home in East Texas, Elvis is dying from blood loss. In the night sky above, the stars align to send Elvis a message: "All is well."
Elvis says "Thank you, thank you very much" and dies.
So, yeah, Bubba Ho-Tep has an ancient Egyptian mummy terrorizing and killing people but the heart of the movie centers around the theme of aging and growing old in a culture that only values the young.
I can't speak highly enough of Bruce Campbell's turn as the aging Elvis. Yeah, he adopts well known cadences and tone of Elvis' speech but it never seems like a parody. Bruce Campbell as Elvis feels lived in, natural. Elvis is forced to deal with the indignities of being old and ravaged by cancer; for fuck's sake, he's got a tumor on his dick. But he's filled with regrets, that he wasn't a better husband to Priscilla or a better father to Lisa Marie and why he didn't stand up to the fucking con man Colonel Parker. Bruce Campbell's performance as Elvis doesn't feel like a performance, it feels real.
Also Ossie Davis as Jack also stands out. Jack's tale of really being JFK is crazy paranoid shit but Ossie's Jack refuses to concede his dignity.
Elvis and Jack are a couple of really old dudes, just doing time at the Shady Rest Retirement Home in East Texas, waiting to die.
A visit by a specter of death gives them one last chance to live before death claims them.
Pretty heavy stuff for a mummy movie.
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