Film Reviews

Bubba Ho-Tep

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Bob Ivy
• Details: US/ 95 mins/ (no cert).

What a genuinely odd film this is. So odd, in fact that Bubba Ho-tep boasts the sort of premise that the likes of David Lynch would probably dismiss as being a little too high concept and out there.
As far as plot matters go, Bubba Ho-tep sees the Elvis Presley (Campbell) banged up in a nursing home with - wait for it - John F. Kennedy (Davis) who has been transformed into an African-American after plenty of CIA shenanigans (don't ask). An ancient Egyptian mummy is picking off the souls of some of the patrons, and clearly has plans for JFK and the King.
A good-spirited camp affair that doesn't take itself too or anything else too seriously, Bubba Ho-tep is about as quirky as films get, fusing together a B-movie horror premise with a truly bizarre set of protagonists, whose back stories appear to have been penned by Oliver Stone on a bad day. File under honourable but weird, right? Wrong. The film might be full of enough peculiar characters and incidents to make the likes of Twin Peaks seem like a perfectly reasonably proposition, but it's also capable of showing a heart and asking some subtle questions of perspective and memory. And at least you can't say you've ever seen anything like it before.

Review by Garreth Murphy