Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Elvis and JFK go into a nursing home. There’s a mummy there who sucks the souls out of old people’s butts. They fight him. Only that’s not a joke; it’s the premise of “Bubba Ho-Tep,” an instant cult classic from director Don Coscarelli, creator of the “Phantasm” and “Beastmaster” films. It’s not as outrageous as it sounds, but it’s still like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Bruce Campbell stars as Elvis, who didn’t really die back in the ‘70s (he switched places with an impersonator to escape the trappings of fame and a broken heart, you see) and lives a miserable, bed-ridden life at the Shady Rest Retirement Village in Mud Creek, Texas. He has bitterness in his heart, legs that require a walker and a pus-filled growth on the tip of his penis. At night he hears strange noises and has visions of his fellow elderly dying. One night, he gets up to pee and has to fight not only incontinence but the biggest, ugliest scarab beetle you’ve ever seen. ("Never ***censored*** with the King,” he tells the bug before spearing and electrocuting it.) Elvis wonders what’s what, and is filled in by the inquisitive, knowledgeable mind of President Kennedy, played by the esteemed African-American actor Ossie Davis—a move explained simply when he says, “They dyed me this way.”

Thanks to the clues he’s been able to find—like hieroglyphics in the visitor’s toilet stall—he reasons the place is being invaded at night by a cursed Egyptian mummy wearing cowboy boots who feeds off the Medicaid-funded residents’ souls. They decide, after a fearful encounter with the monster, to do something about it. ("Ask not what your rest home can do for you,” Elvis implores to Jack, “but what you can do for your rest home.") The rest home scenario is well used. Though the house is dressed to look foreboding and creepy, the various residents they depict aren’t far off from what you’d find roaming the urine-stenched halls of your local long-term care center, from my brief vocational experience with them. The Kemosabe character who wears a Lone Ranger mask and brandishes two cap guns reminded me of a guy they called “the Sheriff,” who wheeled around the place day and night wearing a vest and a badge and carrying a toy weapon in his holster. The plump woman who steals can be found in every center. The only thing they didn’t show were the nursing home sluts.

For the record, as much time as I’ve spent in these places, I never saw a mummy. And for me, the mummy is really secondary to “Bubba,” almost like a bonus. You could take him completely out of the movie, and you’d still have this great story about this friendship between these two old men.
Both Campbell and Davis are believable and play their characters very well, even above the level of the material, but Campbell deserves special attention because he gives a true performance that we’re not accustomed to seeing him give in the likes of the “Evil Dead” movies. When it’s all said and done, “Bubba” is efficient for its low budget, funny and—gasp!—even poignant.

Rod Lott writes about pop culture, annoying celebrities and life’s other absurdities every day at Hitch Daily and he also publishes the long-running Hitch:The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity which is actually made out of paper.