By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Bruce Campbell is genre royalty and has appeared in many films, but he is still best known to movie lovers for the Evil Dead franchise. If you’re like us, you find Campbell’s performances more addictive than a sugary soda from S-Mart and are always on the hunt for more movies featuring his handsome, slightly rubbery face. If you’re ready to hail to the king, here’s some good news: you can now stream Bubba Ho-Tep, Campbell’s weirdest movie, completely for free on Tubi.
What the heck is Bubba Ho-Tep about? Bruce Campbell plays an elderly man in a nursing home who claims to be the very much alive Elvis Presley. He teams up with Jack (played by Ossie Davis), a man claiming to be President John F. Kennedy, healed after the assassination attempt and transformed into a Black man. Together, they must stop a resurrected and rampaging Egyptian mummy, one whom Campbell’s character playfully nicknames “Bubba Ho-Tep.”
Now, if you felt like you were having a stroke while reading that description, here’s a fair warning: that’s pretty much what it feels like to watch it from beginning to end. The film begins with a crazy premise of a long-dead celeb and president teaming up to stop a different kind of evil dead. As a genre fan, I loved how this movie was weirder from the beginning than most movies ever get, and it got delightfully weirder with each scene.
If you’re a very literary nerd, then the name Bubba Ho-Tep may sound familiar. That’s because it’s based on a novella of the same name written by Joe R. Lansdale. The film is relatively faithful in its adaptation, so if you enjoyed the novella, you’ll likely dig the movie (and vice versa). It’s a solid story made that much better by the inclusion of Bruce Campbell, playing against type as an elderly rockstar despite being only 44 years old when the movie came out.
Speaking of Bubba Ho-Tep’s great story, it won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Screenplay, a very prestigious horror award. That’s because the movie goes deeper than Bruce Campbell fighting the evil dead. It also addresses what it means to grow old and irrelevant and the lengths that people will go to in order to feel like they still matter. It’s a poignant meditation on age and aging, albeit in the form of an utterly deranged horror comedy.
Bubba Ho-Tep wasn’t exactly a box office darling, earning only $1.2 million against a budget of $1 million. That was because it was mostly shown via film festivals rather than a traditional worldwide debut. Despite that very limited distribution, it didn’t take long for the movie to win over critics and audiences alike.
On Rotten Tomatoes, Bubba Ho-Tep has a critical score of 78 percent and an audience score of 79 percent. Critics generally praised how the movie effortlessly combines bizarre and over-the-top comedy with sad and wistful nostalgia for lost youth and better days. You get the best of both worlds with this film: it’s a Bruce Campbell screwball horror comedy that might just make you tear up when you least expect it.
Will Bubba Ho-Tep make you laugh, cry, or maybe a bit of both? You won’t know until you stream it for free on Tubi. Afterward, you may never look at Bruce Campbell the same way, and you’ll be able to one-up all the so-called history experts in your orbit by reminding them that Elvis and JFK didn’t die decades ago and instead lived long enough to save the world from an evil mummy.
BUBBA HO-TEP REVIEW SCORE
