#27 + #28: Evil Dead, Bubba Ho-Tep

Double Feature weekend continues with a pair of Bruce Campbell movies!  Bruce Campbell has done a lot of horror movies over the years, most notably his Evil Dead movies, which were briefly turned into a series for a couple years.  Let's start with Bruce's first movie (or at least, the first I ever saw him in), Evil Dead!

Evil Dead (1981) is the primordial cabin-in-the-woods movie, where a bunch of college-age kids decide to head back to nature and end up discovering an old book called the Necronomicon that summons Demons.  In typical dunder-headed-ness, they read from the book, and...  yup!  You guessed it.  All Hell breaks loose.  :-D

So, of course Evil Dead stars Bruce Campbell.  The movie was made on a tight budget, in 1981, by what were basically a bunch of college kids.  Honestly, I'm amazed the movie holds up so well today, but it did spawn two sequels and a series, so maybe it's not that suprirsing.  Bruce Campbell is so young in this movie that he looks like a teenaged Mr. Spock, but acts like William Shatner on Crystal Meth.  Several awesome scenes set this movie apart from all the others that tried to copy it, like the scene where the trees come alive and...  but, I don't want to give anything away.  If you want to see this, I caught it on HDNet (one of the cable movie channels), but you could probably see it on youtube or something.  I've seen this one several times, so it definitely pases the rewatchability test.

Evil Dead 2 was sort of a reboot/remake of Evil Dead, also starring Bruce Campbell, and one of my favorite movies of all time (OF ALL TIME!).  There's this scene in Evil Dead 2 that's missing from evil dead 1, maybe because they made enough money with the first movie to fund some better effects for the second one.  Anyways, there's this scene in Evil Daed 2 where Ash (Bruce Campbell) starts giggling at the absurdity of all the evil things happening to him, and everything in the room, books, mounted deer heads, lamps, starts laughing along with him.  It's the scariest moment of the movie to me, because Ash is basically losing his shit, when he needs to keep it together the most to survive.  Ash has a goddamned good laugh at losing his sanity, perhaps even slipping all the way over the edge before finding his way back, and just that scene alone is what makes Evil Dead 2 one of the best movies ever.  All inspired by Evil Dead, which was successful enough to spawn Evil Dead 2!

Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) is about a lost mummy who comes back from the dead and starts hunting elderly residents at a nursing home, hoping to suck their souls out of their asses to feed himself.  Unfortunately for "Bubba Hotep," two of the residents at the Elderly Care facility are ex-president Kennedy and Elvis, or perhaps they're just senile old farts who think they are those people.  Can Elvis and Kennedy stop the evil mummy and save the residents of the facility, before there aren't any left?

My summary gives away some important plot points, but I do that on purpose, because the movie can be a little confusing at times.  Bruce Campbell plays Sebastian Haff, an elderly Elvis impersonator (or perhaps the real Elvis) who fell off a stage and broke a hip and was in a coma for a number of years.  Ossie Davis (yes, Ossie Davis in a horror movie, classing up the joint) plays the former president Kennedy (yes, the one who was assassinated), who can seemingly walk better than Elvis but needs a motorized wheelchair to get around.  Yeah, so the movie gets a little confusing here and there.  Reggie Bannister (Phantasm) plays the administrator of the nursing home, and Daniel Roebuck plays a hearse driver helping to take out the bodies of the elderly residents.  They don't show Bubba Ho-Tep very often, and I barely managed to catch it on HDNet (again, one of the cable movie channels), but you could probably catch both of these movies there before Halloween's over with.

Holy crap, I just noticed this is my 500th post!  :-D  Woohoo!  Go, me!

That's all for tonight, enjoy Bruce campbell in these two movies on HDnet if you can get there, and if not, there's always youtube.  And, I'm caught up!  Three more movies to reivew, and BAM!  October's almost over!  Hope you're getting your scares and candy in before it's all gone!  See you tomorrow night with another review!