That’s when Elvis joins forces with the black JFK, played by charismatic Ossie Davis, and the two previously downtrodden codgers find new reason to embrace life in their quest to vanquish the ancient evil. Soon after, Bubba Ho-Tep himself appears, shuffling about in cowboy boots and Stetson hat, sniffing around for stinky souls to steal. Elvis’s battle with one such bug is particularly hilarious, especially when he skewers it on a fork, holds it up, and declares with a curly-lipped sneer: “Never, ever, fuck with the King!” The talents of Lansdale, Coscarelli, and Campbell converge brilliantly in Bubba Ho-Tep, although thanks to the lack of foresight from any major Hollywood studio, that fact won’t be widely known until this overlooked gem becomes a hot property on video.Īll the action, except flashbacks, takes place at the Mud Creek Rest Home in East Texas, where the decrepit residents start getting attacked by huge scarab beetles. His subtly nuanced take on the tragic superstar brings Campbell full circle from the Three Stooges like pratfalls of his Evil Dead flicks. And Bruce Campbell is the actor who delivers the goods with a career-topping performance as geezer Elvis. The director who brings Lansdale’s singular vision to life is genre vet Don Coscarelli, who was in his early 20s when his feverish sphere-of-death horror flick Phantasm brought him cult acclaim in 1979. Lansdale, who wrote the offbeat novelette on which the film is based, publishing it in his 1994 short-story collection Writer of the Purple Rage. First off would be hard-nosed East Texas author Joe R. Three people are most responsible for Bubba Ho-Tep‘s surprising success. Who would have thought that such a far-out B-movie premise could result in this sharply directed, wonderfully acted, and laugh-out-loud-funny tale of courage and redemption? Kennedy–who battle a mummy that sucks souls from victims’ arseholes.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MABy Steve Newtonīubba Ho-Tep is a horror-comedy about two elderly men at a rundown retirement home–one supposedly Elvis Presley, the other claiming to be John F.

Joe lansdale bubba ho tep