![]() What better place to claim souls unnoticed than a retirement home? Moreover, the mummy serves as a literal representation of death. It essentially becomes, as Campbell accurately describes it in the audio commentary, “Grumpy Old Ghostbusters.”Ībsurd as it may be, the concept is rather brilliantly conceived. ![]() Watching Campbell and Davis banter as Elvis and JFK would be reason enough to see the movie, but they also take it upon themselves to defend their senior cohorts from the titular monster (“A mummy in cowboy duds some kind of Bubba Ho-Tep,” Elvis christens him). As the present-day Elvis eloquently puts it, he has gone “from the king of rock and roll to this, an old guy in a rest home in east Texas with a growth on his pecker.” (That growth becomes a recurring joke throughout the movie.) ![]() Thankfully, Coscarelli convinced horror icon Bruce Campbell to play Elvis and venerable actor/activist Ossie Davis to co-star as JFK.Ĭoscarelli immediately establishes the tone by showing the contrasting definitions of “Ho-Tep” and “Bubba.” If that wasn’t enough to tip audiences off to the tongue-in-cheek approach, the first scene ought to do the trick. While a solid script is a necessary foundation for any good movie, Bubba Ho-Tep never would have worked without the right leads. Lansdale passed on writing the screenplay for the same reason, so Coscarelli took it upon himself to adapt it, deftly translating the eccentric story into a three-act structure that could be made on a modest budget of $700,000. When cult filmmaker Don Coscarelli ( Phantasm, The Beastmaster) approached Lansdale about optioning the story for a film, the author tried to talk him out of it, as he believed it couldn’t be made. Lansdale (whose work would go on to be adapted into Cold in July and Hap and Leonard), first published in the 1994 anthology The King Is Dead: Tales of Elvis Post-Mortem. The 2002 horror-comedy is based on the short story of the same name by Joe R. Those are the facts according to Bubba Ho-Tep, at least. Kennedy, who was patched up and dyed Black after the assassination attempt. The real Elvis Presley traded places with an impersonator in order to live a simple life as an impersonator himself before retiring to Mud Creek, Texas alongside John F. Elvis has a lot of buzz this awards season, but Baz Luhrmann didn’t get the story right.
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