Bubba Ho-Tep
| State of body | Badly burned, yet strangely… delicious. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected twice. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | Bubba is a competent Mummy, but is not fulfilling his promise. Needs to try harder, and not crib so much from his older brother’s book. |
Bubba Ho-Tep is a strange film. Certainly, it has been riding the art-film circuits on its guilty pleasure promise of high-concept B-grade horror that screams quirky, but the gasps of admiration at having Elvis and JFK in a rest home fighting a soul-sucking Mummy are more for the daring of a film starring two old people than much else.
What really makes this an art-house film is the tone. Bubba Ho-Tep takes the characters seriously, and we spend more time hearing about Elvis’ medical complaints and history than seeing the Mummy - and a good thing too, because the material regarding the Mummy is the weakest part of the film, and what ultimately makes Bubba Ho-Tep not quite satisfying, the kind of film where you come out filled with regrets and what-ifs and wanting to get over to the computer to write a Forensic Report on the topic. Then you sit down at the computer and get distracted by the internet, but you browse in a belligerent, melancholy way that fails to satisfy. And then you go to bed and dream strange dreams, and you wake up and you’re actually celebrity Will Wheaton, body-swapped into your current form by a bizarre teleportation accident.
But I digress.
There are two things to note before I delve into this film. Firstly, it is based on a Joe Lansdale short story, and it follows it very closely. Secondly, the budget for the entire film was about half a million dollars, which moves it from the low-budget to the micro-budget: this is about as cheap as you could make a film nowadays, without filming on video.
There are always problems when you adapt novels for films. Many of the problems are there because you are compelled to trim the novel when doing the adaptation. The ideal size for a straight adaptation is a novella: about 80 - 120 pages (of course, there are exceptions, depending on the content and style of the story, but these are averages). Stephen King’s “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”, adapted into “The Shawshank Redemption” on film, comes in at 106 pages for a 142 minute film. As such, Joe Lansdale’s short story, at 47 pages, is too short for a completely straight 92 minute adaptation. The filmmakers chose to pad the story by showing more of Elvis’ history, adding the scenes with the giant Scarab Beetle and the first murder, and many smaller embellishments. I think the film would have been better served by making the plot a little less straightforward. Our heroes discover the threat, come up with a plan, and execute it. The bad guy dies, and the good guys heroically die saving the rest home’s remaining inhabitants. This is an extremely straightforward plot: there is no escalation of the threat, no last minute twist, no startling revelation. M. Night Shyamalan is crying in his beer - beer that is actually the elixir of life. Fundamentally, we need to make the climax more satisfying. And since the entire budget of the film would pay for approximately one minute of Lord of the Rings, we can’t be spending any extra money. We shall have to resort to trying for something clever.
There are some obvious turns in the plot that the filmmakers didn’t do. Elvis and JFK don’t try to escape the rest home. They don’t try to tell anyone about the threat. They don’t manage to convince anyone of their true identities. These plot ideas were old decades ago; they have Left the Rest Home; they are long ago Dead and Eaten by Bubba Ho-Tep and excreted into the local river, whereupon they have naturally make their way to the tapwater in Hollywood. The filmmakers have wisely not been drinking this water, and we too should attempt to stay within the spirit of the film and try for something a little more quirky.
So let’s concentrate on Bubba. The other characters have had some development and are interesting. However, Bubba is only sporadically interesting. We see that he writes graffiti as he poops souls down the toilet, and that he has some kind of urge to fit in, by wearing the cowboy outfit. He has a cool scarab henchman. He is, apparently, too weak to prey on anyone except old people, which is interesting in itself: this is not a super-powered villain. However, these characteristics are not played on. The hench-beetle gets skewered before Elvis even sees Bubba, and does not make a reappearance. Bubba never looks particularly weak and feeble: he strides along in a confident fashion and makes electric lights blush and explode. The cowboy outfit is never expanded upon. And the way that Bubba is finally killed is particularly disappointing: he gets set on fire, which doesn’t kill him, and then set on fire some more, which does. Huh.
Now we can follow up on some of these interesting points. Bubba is old and decrepit, and is only really capable on feeding on old people, so let’s make him a bit more pathetic. He should move slowly and feebly, except perhaps when he has just fed. The flickering lights, then, don’t represent his power, but his pathetic hunger, his relentless negative energy. He sucks energy from people and things just by being nearby, and the closer he gets, the more he sucks. The struggle against Bubba is, quite explicitly, a struggle against giving in to death. Even the electric wheelchair ought to slow down in its presence. The only characters that actually do get their lives sucked out of them are off-screen in the film: we should sacrifice the lone ranger character as someone who was successfully soul-slurped. This happens in Elvis’ first encounter with Bubba: Elvis has only just started getting his mojo back, so he is easily depressed into a state of lethargy. Bubba is about to slurp his soul, but Elvis is saved by the Lone Ranger. He manages to crawl away as Bubba feasts on the Lone Ranger, perhaps hiding in a janitor’s closet. If we don’t want the mighty to fall quite that far, perhaps he doesn’t move at all, and Bubba just decides to save Elvis for later.
Bubba should also adapt some of the clothing and/or mannerisms of people and things he has sucked. Perhaps, after killing the Lone Ranger, he should have a face-mask. And after his first encounter with Elvis, at some point we should see him in an Elvis-style jumpsuit or a JFK suit.
We have seen Bubba’s prediliction for graffiti: perhaps he should do more of it. He should scribble taunts to JFK and Elvis on the walls, using memories he has sucked from their brains, in an effort to dishearten them (and which, of course, has exactly the opposite effect, as do his costume changes).
And finally, Bubba should have a fatal weakness. Elvis and JFK spend quite some time investigating Bubba in the film. However, their investigation is completely pointless. They already know that the Mummy is there, before they start the investigation. All they discover is how it got there. This is the ideal part of the film to give information on how to destroy Bubba, even if the characters don’t immediately realise it. Perhaps the only thing that will stop him is proper burial rites, rites that he never received when he was first buried (which we can see in the flashbacks, which should also reveal something of Bubba’s character in life - perhaps he was put to death for writing blasphemous graffiti.) Elvis and JFK have to get him back in his coffin and perform the rites - a couple of lines of Egyptian, say, and then burning the coffin.
But first they have to get the coffin, necessitating a fishing expedition: JFK and Elvis, down at the riverside, trying to hook a coffin with heavy fishing line and hooks baited with mystical mojo obtained from JFK’s guidebooks. Perhaps they catch a nasty evil fish first, or a Nile Crocodile, or they drift off to sleep and wake up fishing on the Nile - eventually they hook the coffin and land it using JFK’s powered wheelchair.
They can’t move the coffin up the slope, so they just disguise it, and try and set up a trap so that Bubba will fall into the coffin - and so we come to the finale. First, although it is interesting to have JFK able to walk, but sometimes using a wheelchair, it is less confusing and somewhat more dramatic to keep him in a wheelchair all the time. There is no part of the story that requires him to be able to walk.
In the finale the plan can still be to set Bubba on fire, knowing that it will disable Bubba long enough to get him into the coffin. The first burning, then, can occur pretty much as in the film, except this time Bubba is dressed as Elvis, and JFK and Elvis have to fight off the debilitating effects of being near Bubba - Elvis’ mojo bag actually being of use in this instance. JFK is killed, and Elvis drives the wheelchair at Bubba, picking him up. They fight on the wheelchair, and the wheelchair starts slowing down, its energy sucked out. It just makes it to the slope, at which point it picks up speed again, tumbling down the slope to the river, Elvis trying to aim the wheelchair so that it plonks Bubba straight into the coffin. However, Bubba misses the coffin, and gets to his feet. As Bubba stands over Elvis - remember, in our version Bubba is pretty feeble himself - Elvis sees that his mojo bag has come off, and Bubba is standing in the middle of the loop. Elvis manages to get enough mental and physical strength together to trip Bubba. Bubba falls into the coffin, which Elvis then sets on fire (it has been preprepared with fuel) and recites the final words to send Bubba to hell - Elvis’ last words, finishing with (of course) “Thankyouverymuch”.
It is tempting to look forward and give some suggestions for the film “Bubba Nosferatu - Curse of the She-Vampires,” but that’s not really within the specifications of Film Forensics. Word of mouth on Bubba Ho-Tep has been strong, and it seems as though it is likely to be a profitable film, so perhaps we will see the sequel. Bubba Ho-Tep was almost obsessively faithful to the original short story, to its detriment, in my opinion. The filmmakers have already shown they are not bound by Hollywood convention. Perhaps the sequel will be a little more free and loose.