Heartbreak Hotel movie review (1988)

And things get worse when Weld is hospitalized after a traffic accident.

What to do? Well, Elvis himself is going to appear in Cleveland on Saturday night, and so Schlatter and the members of his band concoct a desperate plot to kidnap Presley and bring him home, to cheer up Mom.

How are they going to get him away from his cocoon of security guards? They come up with a brainstorm. Rosie, the local pizza cook, looks exactly like Elvis’ beloved dead mother. So they’ll give her a black wig, adjust her makeup and convince Elvis that she has returned from the grave for one last visit with her son. Rosie, portrayed by Jacque Lynn Colton in a role the late Divine was born to play, sends Elvis flowers and lures him outside his hotel at 3 a.m., and then the high school kids chloroform him and whisk him away in a pink Cadillac.

Once Elvis enters the plot, the movie ascends new heights of silliness. Elvis, played in the film by David Keith (a good actor who doesn’t look one bit like Elvis), is mad at first, of course. But then he begins to listen when this teenage punk tells him he has lost his sense of danger and is playing it safe for his fans, who are mostly blue-haired old ladies. Elvis also sort of falls for Weld, and he takes a special liking in his heart for her little daughter, Pam (Angela Goethals), who is afraid to sleep with the lights out. The tender bedside scenes between Elvis and the young girl are hard to watch with a straight face, especially if you’ve read Albert Goldman’s muckraking biography Elvis, with its revelations about the King’s taste in pubescent girls.

I don’t know what Chris Columbus, the writer and director of this film, had in mind when he made it. One of my fellow critics, emerging from the screening and wiping tears of incredulous laughter from his eyes, said maybe they were trying to make a Frank Capra film - “Mr. Presley Goes to Ohio.” Elvis gives Schlatter tips on picking up women and holds lessons in pelvis-grinding before agreeing to make a guest appearance at the high school talent show. Any resemblance between this behavior and the real Presley exists only in the realm of fantasy.