Bubba Ho-Tep (2002): written and directed by Don Coscarelli; adapted from the story by Joe R. Lansdale; starring Bruce Campbell (Elvis Presley/ Sebastian Happ) and Ossie Davis (John F. "Jack" Kennedy): Texas horror, Western, and suspense legend Joe R. Lansdale's classic story gets a solid adaptation from writer/director Don "Phantasm" Coscarelli. It's fun, raunchy, melancholy, meditative stuff.
In an East Texas nursing home, Elvis Presley lies in bed most of the time thanks to a hip badly broken in a stage tumble. That tumble happened some time after Presley switched places with the world's best Elvis impersonality in the mid-1970's. Or is "Elvis" just deluded or demented? In any case, he spent years in a coma and now languishes in bed for the most part, feeling sorry for himself.
In that same nursing home resides President John F. Kennedy, as portrayed by Ossie Davis, who is African-American. The assassination was staged to depose Kennedy, who was then.... dyed? that's what JFK thinks, anyway, along with having part of his brain removed and replaced with a bag of sand .... and placed in a nursing home to live out his life in some terrible purgatory. Or is "JFK" just deluded or demented? He sure does have a swell room to himself and a disabled-person scooter that will be a pivotal part of The War To Come.
There will be a call to arms for Elvis and JFK because an ancient Egyptian soul-sucker Mummy has begun eating the souls of the nursing-home residents, and only Elvis and JFK can stop it!
There's a certain amount of the Evil-Dead-style rock'em, sock'em action-horror that made Bruce Campbell's reputation in the original three Evil Dead movies. There's also humour both low and clever. And moments of unexplained silliness. The Mummy "disguises" itself by wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. It's a jarring, funny visual.
But there are moments of rumination on the inequities and sadness of old age, especially old age for those abandoned by the world. But if Elvis has been abandoned (partially because no one believes he's Elvis and still alive), perhaps he can still summon the gumption needed to take a stand against the forces of darkness.
Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis are superb as Elvis and JFK -- funny, winning, and poignant. By the end, their sanity is irrelevant -- it could only be hoped that the last stand of JFK and Elvis could be this heroic, if it were the last stand, which it may not be. Though the promised sequel, Bubba Nosferatu: Curse Of the She-Vampires, has yet to materialize. Come on, guys! Highly recommended.
From a Buick 8 (2002) by Stephen King: King's closest foray into what people now call the New Weird. Sort of. From a Buick 8 is as the very least a foray into the cosmic in which the horror elements are reined in, making Cosmic Mystery rather than Cosmic Terror the order of the day.
Circumstances leave Pennsylvania State Troop D with a bizarre automobile stored in a shed. It was left at a gas station by a creepy looking fellow. Its design is just enough off-normal to make it disturbing. And a quick check of its engine -- or its dashboard -- reveals that it shouldn't be able to run. Stamped on the engine block are the words 'Buick 8,' though the troopers will come over the years to call it a Buick Roadmaster. And on its first day in storage back in 1979, a veteran officer disappears off the face of the Earth, never to be seen again.
Stylistically, this is one of King's great achievements. Several first-person narrators (with one primary narrator) tell the story of the Buick Roadmaster over the course of one long night in 2001. The narrative voices are separate and distinct, and the rhythms of the telling approximate the stops and starts of oral storytelling. They're telling a ghost story around a campfire, but there's no fire and the ghost is real -- and not something as simple as a ghost.
There are a number of effective horror scenes scattered throughout the narrative, mostly rooted in Fear of the Unknown. In many ways, From a Buick 8 is a lengthy riff on H.P. Lovecraft's seminal "The Colour Out of Space." But this time it's a car -- a car whose paint colour doesn't seem quite right to any of those who look at it.
King avoids the third-act problems of many of his more science-fictiony novels here by avoiding any final explanation for the presence and purpose of the Buick Roadmaster. Where Under the Dome or The Tommyknockers sputtered out at the end with disappointing explanations, From a Buick 8 roars off into the silence, unexplained and unknowable. Highly recommended.
Demons (2002) by John Shirley: Really a two-part novel with the halves composed about a decade apart. Demons starts as a splattery supernatural horror novel before metamorphosing into a reality-bending adventure about 100 pages in. One day in the near future, thousands of apparent demons of seven different varieties invade Earth and start killing, torturing, and acting like dicks on the Internet. And that's just the beginning.
The novel shifts into Philip K. Dick territory, and then shifts further into the sort of metaphysical science fantasy that Colin Wilson hit people on the head with back in the 1970's in bait-and-switch novels like The Space Vampires and The Mind Parasites. The philosophies espoused here are much more palatable than those in Wilson's novels. Moreover, Shirley keeps his characters fallible and the ground-level stakes in view. The scenes of horror towards the end of the novel are more Zombie Apocalypse than Demonic Invasion, but they're repeatedly framed in terms of human loss and sorrow.
I liked Demons a lot. Your response may vary depending on how much mystical lunacy you're willing to withstand. Recommended.
