The King lives!

This weird but rather wonderful movie has an aged Elvis Presley not dead but hanging out in a grotty old people's home in Texas wondering just why he allowed a pretender to take his place a decade or two ago, and whether the lump on his private parts is cancer or not.

He is impersonated by Bruce Campbell, veteran of The Evil Dead and The Phantasm Franchise, who can never have done anything better. Campbell's performance is almost equalled by Ossie Davis's fellow inmate, who is convinced he's President Kennedy and thinks something odd is happening at the home, apart from nurse Ella Joyce smearing ointment on Elvis's lump.

He's right. There are large cockroaches in the rooms which transmogrify into an Egyptian mummy called Bubba, which is attempting to suck the patients' blood.

No, I have not made this up. Don Coscarelli took his tale from a short story by Joe Lansdale. It is very funny, if totally uneven, like a crazed B-movie of old.

You forgive the film almost everything for its good parts, which generally involve Elvis's ruminations on his past, his lump and the way he's being treated. The laughs are often black as pitch.

Campbell does not try to mimic Elvis so much as play a man who was once world famous and is now almost totally ignored.

His final fight to the death with Bubba is almost an allegory about death and disappointment. If this doesn't become a cult movie, I don't know what will. Daft as it is, there are some basic truths here that stick like leeches to the memory.

Bubba Ho-Tep
Cert: cert15