My Name is Bruce movie review (2008)

Also, please consult my review of "Bubba Ho-Tep" (2002). In that film, which is set in recent times, Elvis and JFK did not die, but are roommates in an East Texas nursing home. Campbell plays Elvis. Ossie Davis plays JFK. "But you're black," Elvis observes. JFK nods: "After Lyndon Johnson faked my assassination, they dyed me."

You see that Bruce Campbell often returns value for money. And in that spirit, I welcome his first work as a director since "The Man With the Screaming Brain" (2005). Here he plays himself in a lampoon of his career, his movies, his genres and everything else he stands for. Maybe it's only "one-note insider navel-gazing," writes one of its critics, but if the navel has been there, done that and had unspeakable horrors wreaked onto it, the navel has paid its dues.

The plot involves a movie star helping to save Gold Lick, Ore., from an ancient Chinese god named Guan-Di, played by James J. Peck, although that could be anybody inside the suit. (I know Dave Prowse, who wore the Darth Vader suit, and a lot of good that did him.) Guan-Di, the God of War, for reasons best known unto himself, inhabits a falling-apart shanty-board crypt in the decrepit local cemetery that looks like the set for a grade-school production of a haunted graveyard movie. His eyes are flaming coals. Hard to see the evolutionary advantage there.

Campbell depicts himself as a drunken slob behind on his alimony, a vain egotistical monster, a phony, a poser and a man in flight from his most recent movie, "Cave Alien 2." This movie would make the perfect lower half of a Bruce Campbell double feature. If you don't already know who Bruce Campbell is, it will set you searching for other Bruce Campbell films on the theory that they can't all be like this. Start with "Evil Dead II," is my advice. Not to forget "Bubba Ho-Tep." In fact, start with them before "My Name Is Bruce," which is low midrange in the Master's oeuvre.