|
Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
|
|
|
|
|
Elvis lives !
No really, in this movie he does (& is played by Bruce Campbell), since
instead of him the impersonator he has traded places with after Priscilla has
left him has died, while the real Elvis had spent his later years as an
Elvis-impersonator living happily in a trailerpark ... until at one of his
concerts he broke a hip ...
Now he lives in a rest home, barely able to move, with a genital condition,
& his best friend is a black man who claims to be John F.Kennedy (Ossie
Davis), & who thinks Lyndon B.Johnson will come to kill him any day now
(even though L.B. has died years ago ... "That won't stop him !").
It's only when people from the rest home start to die from inexplicable
causes & Elvis & JFK get attacked by unnaturally big cockroaches that
they are woken out of their stupor & see the need to do ... something.
Soon, JFK has found out that an Egyptian soul-sucking mummy (that sucks the
souls out of people's arses) that somehow got lost in the region might be
behind all this, & they even see the mummy (Bob Ivy) killing one of the
home's other residents, crazy Kemosabe (Larry Pennell) - who thinks he's the Lone
Ranger. Since they themselves know how crazy that story sounds, they
not even try to tell it to anyone else but decide to in the next night face the
mummy in battle themselves ... even though they are hardly able to move without
a walker or a wheelchair.
The fight proves to have the expected grotesque results, with both Elvis
& JFK being way too slow to outwit the mummy, & JFK has to give his
life in battle. Elvis has broken a rib, too, but he can hang on long enough to
grab the flame-thrower he has pclumsily lost before & burn the mummy to
cinders, therefore save his own soul. Only then it's time for him to go too.
The movie is not as funny as it sounds at first, but neither is it as bad as
it might sound at second thought.
Instead of making some gross-out slapstick-comedy with an over-the-top Elvis
in it, director Coscarelly has delivered a deliberately slow-moving horror pic
(it does take place in a rest home after all with its 2 heroes being well
beyond 60, how can you expect speed after all), & infuses the proceedings
with a mock David Lynch weird atmosphere that never loses it's tongue in cheek
approach. It might not be a masterpiece, or the cult movie to end all
cults, but it's amoody & entertaining piece of film, & Bruce Campbell
plays a wonderful Elvis who's both pathetic & wickedly funny.
|