THANK YOU. THANK YOU VERY MUCH: The new Bruce Campbell joint, co-starring Ossie Davis and directed by Don Coscarelli, has been previewing around the country seeking to establish it's audience. Bubba Ho-tep has been on a limited number of screens during the last week and, locally to me, will run at San Fran's Fabulous Castro Theater through Thursday.
Bubba Ho-tep is pulled off with good acting and good filmaking -- good theater, well-mediated on film by disciplined professionals who don't have billions to burn. The action sequences manage to be viscerally affecting despite using special effects reminiscent of Puppetmaster II and/or my little brother snapping the lights on and off while making thunder noises.
Some might call it a not-ready-for-prime-time cross between Cocoon and A Nightmare On Elm Street, or Tough Guys and The Mummy, but only if they hadn't seen Duplex Planet and Meet the Feebles. And others might beat dead the very horse that pulls the Bruce Campbell bandwagon, overselling the film like an artless regime change in Mesopotamia. Then there are some whose darker motivations for supporting Bubba Ho-tep can only be guessed at.
Unlike Army of Darkness, which brilliantly refreshed the horror genre through parody, Bubba Ho-tep uses genre as license to play with icons of American culture at a cartoonish level of vulgar intimacy. Depending on how seriously you're willing to take it, Bubba Ho-tep could have been written either by a young Don DeLillo interning for a summer at The Weekly World News or a younger Ken Burns drinking way too much Dr. Pepper and then annotating the bejesus out of a Halloween themed Mad-Lib. Also, it could have been written by Joe R. Landsdale, which it was. I invite you to take him as seriously as you can.
No comments:
Post a Comment