Egyptian Cowboy Zombie Junkie

I’m honored to be guest of, er, honor at a cult film festival tonight. The Good, the Bad & the Uglier runs at Charleston’s Calhoun Library Auditorium, showing gems like American Movie and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

The fest offers audiences the chance to see some fun, oddball films on the big screen, the way they should be seen. I’ll be introducing Bubba Ho-Tep, the independent fave that features Elvis battling a giant cockroach.

The flick will run after The Mummy Strikes, a Fleischer Superman short from 1943. By the time this $30,000 cartoon was released, Universal had made 3 mummy movies with more on the way, so bandaged baddies were a hot subject. The toon used many of the same conventions, phrases and sound effects as the radio show that preceded it – it even uses the same main actors, Joan Alexander and Clayton ‘Bud’ Collyer as Lois and Clark.

This Superman is clad in darkness, which helps us o forgive the shortcomings of the ‘40s artwork. No wonder the guy squints all the time. The Mummy Strikes features some unusual mummies, with more flesh and more vivid expressions on ‘em than you’ll usually see on the big screen.

Bubba Ho-Tep is a festival darling directed by Don Coscarelli. His Beastmaster movie ranks just behind Gone With the Wind in the Turner cable ratings, but he’s best known for Phantasm 1-4, a series of horror movies with balls. When the filmmaker heard that writer Joe Lansdale was hot in horror fiction and that his work always had a high body count, he decided to make a faithful adaptation of his short story. It was worth the effort – his screenplay was recently nominated for a Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers’ Association.

Cult star Bruce Campbell was recommended by Spiderman director Sam Raimi. Bruce fondly referred to Bubba Ho-Tep as ‘the dick movie’, because his character has a growth on his pecker.

This is the best movie ever made about Elvis and JFK in a retirement home battling giant roaches and a mummy with a penchant for cowboy hats. It’s odd, hilarious, the acting’s great, the gags work – check out the subtitles - and it’s poignant, too. The Festival punters are in for a real treat.