Best Movies You've Probably Never Heard Of: A Review of Bl;ood Moon and Bubba Ho-Tep

By June Pulliam

02/02/2006

As you regular readers know, we generally decline to review works that aren’t current in some way, either recently published, or released in theaters, or new to DVD, etc. Part of the reasoning behind this policy has to do with the availability of texts. In other words, we do our readers no service if we aren’t reviewing material that they can easily get their hands on. However, the idea of “availability” is changing with new technology, particularly with regards to film.  I am old enough to remember the days when I had to wait for the re-release of Hitchcock’s films into theaters before I got my first peek at Psycho, since I was two years shy of being born when the film originally premiered, and VCRs and videos cheaply available to the average student were about four years away. Now, services such as Netflix, with their huge DVD libraries, have made it possible for someone to easily obtain nearly any film without having to hope these things are available at the local video store. And of course, the existence of internet commerce itself has made it increasingly more possible for one to be an eclectic and knowledgeable viewer of film since it is extremely easy, and often affordable, to purchase outright new and used copies of DVDs and have them shipped to even the most remote of locations. It is in this spirit that I launch this new feature of Necropsy: films that you should go out and rent. In this way, we hope to not only assist readers in finding in bookstores and theaters material that will interest them, but also suggest other works they might have never heard of, but might enjoy viewing.

I am beginning this segment with a double feature: a review of two films that our readers might have never heard of, in spite of their excellent writing and cast.  The 2001 made for television 1 film Blood Moon (released in the United States under the title Wolf Girl), directed by Thom Fitzgerald, is an updated version of Todd Browning’s 1931 classic Freaks, with a touch of Carrie and Cabaret. The film opens to a mixed sex group of attractive high school bullies, led by Crystal, walking through the woods, looking to alleviate their boredom with a shooting contest.  Crystal is about ready to shoot at a tame rabbit that appears in the middle of a clearing when the creature’s protector, Crying Ryan, appears.  Of course, Ryan received his nickname in grade school, and his tormentors have never forgotten their first triumph over his spirit. They proceed to berate him once again.  But before they can fall too deeply into this all too well-worn rut, their attention is diverted by carnival music blaring from a passing caravan. The freak show has come to town, and their arrival theme song asks the musical question “Is your life too normal?” thus setting up the film’s major premise—what is the nature of the category of the normal.

Harley Dune’s oddity show contains a better selection of actual circus freaks than is found in Todd Browning’s film. While pin heads are a bit too politically incorrect for this freak show (or perhaps this audience), the carnival features a geek, a bearded lady, a fat woman, various contortionists, sword swallowers and people who can stab themselves with nails and needles, midgets, performers who are missing various limbs, and the star of the show, Tara the Wolf Girl. Tara is a teenager who would be considered quite lovely were it not for the long blonde fur that covers her face and body.

Harley Dune (wonderful played by the very talented and underappreciated Tim Curry) and performers are one big family and care for one another deeply, and the show they put on isn’t so much one that merely exploits the oddities of its performers, but also displays their talents for vaudeville. Dune himself performs with the bearded lady in the Follicle Follies, and one of the midgets and two of the hermaphrodites do a striptease reminiscent of the old burlesque shows. And Grace Jones particularly shines as Christine/Christophe, an individual whose costuming identifies her as half man/half woman. Tara, with the help of prosthetic teeth and claws, is nightly brought before the public in a cage and presented as the feral wolf girl, snarling over a killed rabbit. Tara’s on-stage persona is a marked contrast from her real self, a gentle vegetarian.

Of course, Crystal and the other high school bullies aren’t content to merely visit the freak show. They derive great pleasure in tormenting Tara, as she is the one most freakish and nearest their own ages. But Ryan too has his own fascination with Tara and the freak show, and offers to help her. The gangly and unattractive Ryan is the child of a single mother, the beautiful Leslie Ann Warren, who is a research scientist in a local cosmetic surgery firm. She is currently performing secret experiments in her basement lab in order to develop a depilatory that can remove back hair. The scene where we first meet her and the firm is particularly telling. One of the company’s CEO’s tells a room full of research scientists that they are on the verge of being able to detect and correct in utero the “defect” of brown eyes. If their twisted ideas of beauty don’t set the viewer up to see them as the film’s real villains, then their animal testing will.

While the outcast Ryan already sees the unimproved Tara as quite beautiful, he sees that she is not happy spending her life as a circus freak and would like to be normal, so he offers her access to his mother’s depilatory drug. In spite of the side effects such as hallucinations and radical personality changes, Tara is all to happy to take the experimental drug, as it means that she can be transformed into a normal, beautiful girl. And in a reversed version of the fairy tale, Tara’s transformation into beautiful woman necessarily means that she will also become more bestial, and therefore, not that different from the bullies we are introduced to at the beginning of the film. Of course, similar to Freaks, the normal people are far more evil than those they hold up as examples of what they are not.  When Crystal sees the fat lady, she is compelled to vomit the small of cotton candy that she’s ingested lest she too become fat. And everyone, most especially the normal people, has a dark secret to hide that would permanently disqualify them from this ever shifting category.    

Other wonderful aspects of this film include Christophe Beck’s salacious and rollicking carnival music and Oana Paunescu’s retro and timeless costumes for the performers.

Don Coscerelli’s 2002 film Bubba Ho-tep is another original addition to the horror genre.  Based on a Joe R. Lansdale short story of the same name, Bubba Ho-tep finds an aging Elvis Presley languishing in an East Texas rest home while the world believes that he is really dead.  However, thirty years previous to the film's action, Elvis, bored with fame, switched places with Sebastian Haff, one of his many impersonators. While this switch was supposed to be temporary, the Elvis impersonator had a more prodigious love of drugs than the King and promptly died before the ruse could be reversed. Then, one day Elvis, while impersonating himself, fell of a stage and broke his hip, landing him in the Big Muddy Rest Home with a black man (Ossie Davis) who believes that he is really Jack Kennedy. Coscerelli’s film and script do an excellent job of representing the daily indignities visited on rest home residents. When we first meet Sebastian, his day is spent in bed, nodding in and out of consciousness, occasionally punctuated by going to the bathroom or being ferried down to the dining hall to eat the school lunch room food that passes for dinner. These people truly are the living dead. And when Elvis’s roommate dies, his daughter comes to claim his meager personal effects, throwing in the trash things such as his photographs and Purple Heart medal.

But something evil is stalking the Big Muddy Rest Home. At night, Elvis and Jack can hear a shuffling in the hall, and the next morning a resident is found dead, allegedly of natural causes. Jack and Elvis know that not all is right—in the visitor’s bathroom is graffiti in the form of hieroglyphs etched into the stall. The two soon realize that an ancient creature is stalking the residents of the rest home whose helplessness makes them particularly easy prey. That’s when the two decide to team up and reclaim their lives by hunting down this immortal, who is sucking out souls through the anuses of his victims.

Coscerelli’s script captures Lansdale’s short story down to his unique way of writing dialogue, a sort of Texas catachresis that yokes together the most unlikely vulgarities and cultural allusions. Also, Davis as Jack and Bruce Campbell as Elvis give masterful performances. And the special effects that produce Bubba Ho-tep are particularly notable. Bubba Ho-tep is a monster worthy of the best drive in horror films.

While Blood Moon is a thoughtful remake of Freaks, Bubba Ho-tep is wholly original. Both are intelligent and stylish horror films in their own rights.