There are few actors who can successfully survive slogging through the depths of bad movies time and time again and still come out with their career and dignity intact. Bruce Campbell has managed to do just that with a combination of sheer charisma and a natural comedic talent.
With the wink of an eye, Campbell has starred in such trash heaps as Man with the Screaming Brain (which he also directed), Moontrap and Icebreaker, with occasional forays into quality with the Evil Dead series, cameos and numerous syndicated TV shows.
His B-movie lifestyle choice continues with the self-satirizing My Name is Bruce, a sometimes funny but often aggravating horror send-up directed by the man himself.
Yes, it’s a bad movie. With its stale script, numerous plot holes and lame characters, it’s pretty awful and often much worse than the movies it is sending up. But through it all, Campbell once again pulls off his usual ninja-like trick of deftly maneuvering through the garbage as if he is in a different, and much better, movie.
The movie falls around him like a small town being destroyed by a tornado, but after the destruction he is left standing in the wreckage as he does a little dance and throws a smoke bomb to distract us as he runs off into the night. (Somehow all is forgiven … as usual.)
In the film, Campbell mines a topic he has approached before in his work–that of Bruce Campbell. He plays himself as a washed-up, trailer-dwelling, alcoholic sleazeball who loathes his fans and his career as he is forced to star in films like Cave Alien 2. That’s the funny bit, and if the film had been just about that it could have been good, but the script by TV writer Mark Verheiden unwisely throws in a faux-horror plot that feels like bad Bruce Campbell fan fiction.
A young Goth teen, who happens to be a Bruce Campbell super-fan, accidentally unleashes a Chinese war deity in a fictional Southern Oregon mining town. A few severed heads later, he enlists the help of his hero to battle it. The gaunt teenager somehow thinks that because Bruce Campbell battled the Evil Dead three times as Ash, that the shotgun- and chainsaw-wielding butt kicking would translate to real life.
Obviously it doesn’t. Or it doesn’t until movie-Bruce mans up and grows a conscience.
The townsfolk team up, destroy the rubber-masked deity with the help of tofu (please don’t ask) and the credits role. It may sound just odd enough, à la Bubba Ho-Tep, to be a “so bad, it’s good” horror movie, but trust me, it’s not.
Bruce Campbell brings his film to Portland in person Dec. 13 and 14, and if you venture to the theater to see the B-movie legend in person remember that you’ve been warned. This movie is so bad that it’s, well, bad.
Watch POPTUB’s interview with Bruce Cambell