A mummy attacks!

I sometimes wonder where screenwriters get their ideas from… „Bubba Ho-tep“ is one of such bizarre screenplays. Let’s imagine an elderly resident of a nursing home who thinks he’s Elvis Presley. He claims that he switched roles with his imitator many years ago and that’s how he landed at this place in East Texas. Together with his “best friend”, a black J.F. Kennedy, he faces a mission of rescuing the nursing home from an evil Egyptian mummy which prowls the corridors of the house in search of the residents’ souls. It’s worth mentioning that this mummy sucks souls from their bodies through their… arseholes. If you add to this that one of the residents thinks he’s actually a cowboy from the Wild West who sleeps with his toy guns and the mummy itself is a ridiculous tacky shape from E class films you can more or less get a picture what kind of a parody this film is. I couldn’t help laughing all the time, because the whole idea of this piece was utterly ridiculous. Although I’m usually not into such kinds of films, I really enjoyed this one. You just have to treat it like a kind of simple entertainment which doesn’t lack imagination and has a more sophisticated plot than typical American mainstream comedies.

Among some highlights of this film I’d mention first of all the heavy Southern accent of Mr Presley which honestly made me switch on subtitles. This made me think of us, possible future interpreters, having to be extremely flexible and prepared for hundreds of different accents (which isn’t an easy task). Furthermore, I loved the atmosphere of the dark, half-dead nursing home where people were “disposed of” and now only wait for their death, living only from meal to meal. In one scene Elvis’s roommate dies and his daughter comes after a few days to take away his belongings. Elvis asks why she hadn’t visited his father within three years of his stay in the nursing home. She answers that she had been busy. That’s in lots of cases the essence of sending elderly relatives to such institutions. Last but not least I’d like to point out a very good performance of Bruce Campbell who played “Elvis”. He managed to convince me as a tired bored guy who seeks for something that would revive his life at last.
To sum up, if you need a big laugh, just grab for „Bubba Ho-tep“.