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Canonically Weird (The List)

190. BUBBA HO-TEP (2002)

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“I’m watching this movie, it’s this picture about, uh… it’s really weird. It’s like the guy who took the acid or something, he smoked a marijuana or something before he wrote this picture…”—“The King,” speaking to an unknown party on his cell phone during the Bubba Ho-Tep DVD commentary

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Ossie Davis, Ella Joyce

PLOT: Having giving up fame for a simple life and switched places with Elvis impersonator Sebastian Haff, Elvis Presley is now an aging old man with a boil on his penis languishing in an East Texas retirement home. One of his fellow retirees is Jack, an African American who insists that he is actually ex-President John Kennedy. The two old men discover that a mummy is haunting the corridors of the rest home, feeding on the souls of the elderly, and together they hatch a plan to defeat the creature.

Still from Bubba Ho-tep (2002)
BACKGROUND:

  • Bubba Ho-Tep is a faithful adaptation of a novella by cult horror writer Joe R. Lansdale first composed for the now out-of-print anthology “The King is Dead: Tales of Elvis Post-mortem,” which also contained stories and essays by Roger Ebert, Lou Reed, and Joyce Carol Oates, among others.
  • The budget was reported to be between $500,000 and $1,000,000. Although there is a flashback concert scene in the film, the producers could not afford to license any actual Elvis songs, so you only hear generic Vegas-showroom-style intro music. Similarly, the scenes from the “Elvis” movie marathon seen on television are just cleverly-edited stock footage, with no actual Elvis films ever glimpsed.
  • The end credits announce a prequel called Bubba Nosferatu: Curse of the She-Vampires. Although intended as a joke, fan interest in such a movie ran so high that Coscarelli, Lansdale and Bruce Campbell tried to get it made, although it never came together. Campbell has reportedly lost interest in the project and it is presumably as dead as Elvis.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Aging Elvis, in his trademark rhinestone suit and cloak and a walker, marching off to face off against a mummy.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The only way Bubba Ho-Tep could have failed to be weird is if it lacked faith in its premise of a geriatric Elvis and a black JFK fighting a mummy in a rest home, and instead turned the tale into a self-congratulatory parody. Thankfully, everyone involved takes the story and characters at face value, honoring the oddness and humanity of the inherently absurd situation.

Original trailer for Bubba Ho-Tep

COMMENTS: No matter what we achieve in life, whether it’s Continue reading 190. BUBBA HO-TEP (2002) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADELE BLANC-SEC (2010)

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Les Aventures Extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Louise Bourgoin, Nicolas Giraud, Jacky Nercessian, Gilles Lellouche, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre,

PLOT: In 1911, novelist and adventuress Adele Blanc-Sec seeks an ancient Egyptian cure to bring her twin sister out of a coma; her plans are interrupted when she must deal with a pterodactyl who is terrorizing Paris.

Still from The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s more Spielberg-on-the-Seine than a weird movie per se.

COMMENTS: Adèle Blanc-Sec will probably remind you of those fantasy/adventure hybrids from the mid-1980s, movies like Big Trouble in Little China and Young Sherlock Holmes that mixed swashbuckling with the supernatural in an attempt to cash in on the cachet of Raiders of the Lost Ark. If you imagine Audrey Tautou’s Amelie Poulain cast in the role of Indiana Jones, you wouldn’t be too far off the style here. Assaying the title character from a popular series of French graphic novels, newcomer Louise Bourgoin (previously a weather girl) stars as a proto-feminist novelist/adventurer at the dawn of the 20th century, the era just before the myths and legends of the ancient past were scoured away by the mustard gas blast of World War I. Interestingly, although all of her foils are male, no one in the French patriarchy comments on Blanc-Sec’s gender. She’s so confident and forceful in her actions—always seizing the initiative and never giving anyone else the opportunity to object—that we really believe her sex is not an issue. Adele bumbles around like an absent-minded professor, blind to everything that is alien to her goal of resurrecting her sister from her coma, including the clumsy advances of a young scientist who’s smitten by her. Yet, she’s also incredibly composed under pressure, not even breaking a sweat when she’s captured by an oily nemesis in the middle of raiding a pharaoh’s tomb.

Bourgoin is excellent in the role, and what success the movie achieves is largely due to her performance. Visually, the movie is a mixed bag. The cinematography is great, the set design (from desert tombs to Adele’s apartment, cluttered with relics from her adventures) is fantastic, and director Luc Besson’s eye for composition is as imaginative as always. Unfortunately, when it comes to effects and makeup, Blanc-Sec is not up to contemporary standards, giving the movie a cheap, ersatz Hollywood sheen that detracts from the sense of wonder the movie is desperate to instill. The pterodactyl is fine in closeups, but when it’s animated in clumsy CGI, it looks about a decade or more behind current technology. The grotesque Halloween makeup is unnecessary; it’s purpose, it seems, is to transform the onscreen characters into the exact duplicates of the characters from the graphic novel. One character has ridiculous eyebrows, another has unnatural dark spots surrounding his eye sockets, and the nutty professor of parapsychology wears a liver-spotted latex mask that just looks wrong. The makeup all looks slightly uncanny rather than whimsically cartoonish, as intended. The comic plot tries very hard to entertain, with telepathic connections to dinosaurs, a Clouseau-esque investigator who accidentally talks into his shoe, and reanimated Egyptians who speak perfect French and are fond of pranks. In fact, if anything Adele Blanc Sec may try a little too hard to impress, coming off as desperate; but any movie that manages to fit both pterodactyls and mummies into its running time has something to recommend it.

France just doesn’t have the funds to compete with Hollywood when it comes to blockbuster international entertainment; even in its dubbed version, Adele Blanc-Sec barely played American theaters (although the film did well in the Far East, surprisingly, and managed to break even on its budget). The movie arrived unceremoniously on Region 1 DVD three years late, without fanfare, from specialty distributor Shout! Factory. In a small controversy, a brief and apparently inconsequential scene of Bourgoin bathing in the nude was not included in Shout!’s initial release (as it had been snipped from the U.S. theatrical print). Three weeks later, however, Shout! issued a “director’s cut” with the topless footage included, forcing early-bird cinephiles to double dip if they wanted to catch the double nips.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Matching lavish period sets to surreal visual effects, Besson has crafted a feast for the eyes – but while there is absurdity aplenty on display here, the film also requires a very high tolerance for the broadest of humour and the slightest of whimsy.”–Anton Bitel, Eye for Film (contemporaneous)

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

THE MUMMY (1959)

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This post is part of an ongoing series on Hammer horror director Terence Fisher.

The mummy, as a character, quickly became bland. In 1932, director Karl Freund, writer John L. Balderstein, and stars Boris Karloff and Zita Johnann made a poetic film for the Universal horror cannon, re-working the story of Dracula in Egyptian guise.  The Mummy’s Hand (1940) starring cowboy actor (and later Captain Marvel) Tom Tyron, was the first and only real decent of the Universal mummy sequels.  Increasingly feeble films followed Hand, all starring a rotund mummy in the form of a disinterested Lon Chaney, Jr.  Dating back to the original, the plot rarely varied throughout the series.  An Egyptian princess reincarnates in the form of a twentieth century woman, only to have her ancient lover come back, a tad lethargic, gauze and all, to reclaim her.

Oddly, Francis Ford Coppola lazily utilized the mummy’s  reincarnated dead lover plot for his version of Dracula (1992), which, otherwise, was a (mostly) well done, imaginative version of that story.  In 1999 the mummy was revived again in a dumbed down, lame, testosterone-laden joke of a movie starring Brendan Frazier.  That film also spawned numerous sequels.  True to form,the succeeding mummy entries were even worse, which, in this case, isn’t saying anything.

Still from The Mummy (1959)In between the 1932 and 1999 films, Hammer Studios predictably took a stab at the character.  They spared no expense in soliciting the talents of Terence Fisher, along with top stars Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.  Where they did spare expense was in an original story. The Mummy (1959) liberally borrowed elements from the formulaic Universal series, and reincarnated the reincarnated princess plot.  Briskly paced direction from Fisher, along with sumptuous color from Hammer cinematographer Jack Asher, almost overcomes the paint-by-number plot, which screenwriter Jimmy Sangster tried valiantly to inject with his own sensibilities.  Of course, the medium of film is more than mere storytelling and The Mummy is a film that tries to go a long way to prove that; because, basic rehashed story aside, the film itself is no lumbering undead.  It may be Fisher’s most energetic work.

Peter Cushing, as Dr. Banning, is in enthusiastic form.  No one can get strangled like Cushing, and his near-death experience and confrontation with co-star Lee in Banning’s study  is pure red-blooded Fisher, ranking with the acting duo’s battle in Horror of Dracula.   Equally interesting is  when Cushing’s Banning antagonizes the antagonist in the most proven way imaginable; he insults the other guy’s religion.  Ironically, it is Banning, rather than the mummy, who limps here, the result of an untended accident in Egypt.  Christopher Lee is the darling among genre fans.  He is far more discussed than  his co-star.  As iconic an actor as Lee is, his favored status is something of a slight to Cushing, since the latter is, normally, the  superior actor.  However, in this film, the acting honors are a draw, with Lee giving an admirably nuanced, minimalist performance as the title character.  Lee’s Kharis cannot compete with Karloff’s masterful Imhotep, but Lee invests genuine pathos, dread, and menace into the role. Yvonne Furneaux is striking as the Kharis/Banning love interest, but not much is required of her other than letting her hair down and shouting “No!”

Kharis’  resurrection from the swamp is beautifully photographed and effectively conveys robust dread.  Another well-shot sequence is the mummy’s entrance into an asylum to exact revenge on Banning’s father.  Franz Reizenstein’s score expertly accentuates the film, matching Fisher’s bloodied full moon milieu.  The Mummy reminds me a bit of The  Guns of Navarone (1961).  You know what’s around the corner, but that hardly stops the enjoyment of getting there.