Bruce Campbell Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Get ready to break out your copies of The Zombie Survival Guide, and be sure to stock up on bottled water and "lobos" (you know, those weapons with which one decapitates the living dead in hand-to-hand combat) -- Max Brooks's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is being made into a film, with J. Michael Straczynski (who's also scribing Silver Surfer) adapting the book for the big screen. The film is being produced by Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment and Paramount is distributing.This is probably old news to some of you, but it's exciting news to me, since I just last night finished reading World War Z.

I was absolutely immersed in this book and found it hard to put down. I've had deliciously scary zombie nightmares regularly while reading it, and have spent waayyyyyy more time than is probably healthy in discussions with my husband about the practical issues surrounding surviving a plague of the undead, comparing World War Z to Stephen King's plague book, The Stand, and pondering whether such a thing as an undead plague could actually scientifically happen (see, this kind of freakish obsessiveness is why I don't read or watch a lot of horror ...).

You know how it is on Valentine's Day, if you're not involved with (or married to) anyone. You try to avoid those annoying radio and TV commercials about how the men need to show their love by buying the women in their lives all kinds of fancy things. You attempt to make plans with friends, but they're all hoping for something romantic or planning to mope about their lack of romance. Maybe you join the Anti-Valentine's League, maybe you just try to ignore it all until the hype is over.

But there you are on Valentine's Day night with no plans, and naturally you gravitate toward the time-tested entertainment method of sitting in front of the TV with a good movie. Pizza and/or ice cream might also be part of the viewing process. For years, I liked to curl up with a thin-crust pizza from the local pizza joint, a pint of that Ben and Jerry's ice cream with the chunks of brownies in it, some Dr. Pepper (to be tres Agnes Gooch about it) and my favorite Valentine's movie, Some Like It Hot. After all, it is set around the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, so it's a delightfully sideways hat tip to the holiday. Plus, that glorious last line. But maybe you're in a different mindset on February 14. Here's a list of movies to cover whatever kind of mood might strike you that night, as you ponder which movie you want to spend St. Valentine's Day with.

To know Bruce Campbell is to love him. Just ask the massive collection of movie nerds who just love the lantern-jawed cult hero. (Matter of fact, that'd probably work as a good test for a new friend: If they don't know who Bruce Campbell is, get rid of 'em!) Sure, sure, Bruce has popped up in more than his share of stinkers (what genre actor hasn't?), but it's tough to hold a grudge against the hero of Bubba Ho-tep and the Evil Dead trilogy. Plus he's hilarious in those Spider-Man cameos, and if you like I could rattle off a bunch more cool credits...

But we're here to focus on Mr. Campbell's latest exploit, a self-referential horror comedy called (logically enough) My Name is Bruce. We've been hearing about this flick for quite some time now, but things seem to be moving forward ... a little. Courtesy of Bloody-Disgusting.com we have a plot synopsis:

"A small town [is] set upon by demons after a group of teen-agers unwittingly unleash an ancient curse. Campbell, playing himself, is kidnapped off the set of a B horror movie and, despite his protestations that he's just an actor, is forced to play the role of his heroic movie character in order to save the town."

Heh. Clever. And hey, click here for the trailer! Aside from the one groaner (mocking Asian accents is so 1935), I'd call that trailer more entertaining than Man with the Screaming Brain and Alien Apocalypse combined. Directed by Campbell himself and penned by Mark Verheiden (Battlestar Galactica, Timecop, The Mask), My Name is Bruce is a Dark Horse Entertainment production. According to the IMDb, the rights belong to either Image or Lionsgate. Either way, it should arrive on your DVD shelves relatively soon ... I hope.

[ Thanks to The Movie Blog for the poster image. ]

You should know by now that Bruce Campbell is one heck of a guy. Even if you disregard all of his other work, he is the one dude to name and defeat Spider-Man. It takes a special guy to stand up to superheroes and win with ease and snarky grace. But that's Campbell's undeniable strength. His words are his special power, and whether he's strapping a chainsaw to his bloody stump, blocking a theater door, or bringing down undead zombies while suffering penis boils, he gets the job done without any super strength, agility, or wild, physical powers. I'm leaving Ash off the list for now, as he might get his own love sometime in the future, so for now -- just grab your popcorn, sit back, watch some films, and try to answer the question: Who stands supreme? Spidey and the tough usher, or a sassy, aged Elvis?

First, you need the obligatory commercials that start movies these days, but it doesn't have to be something time-wasting and annoying. Before sitting down to these films, take a clue from Campbell, and delight in some Old Spice.

Deadites weren't the only thing that Bruce Campbell fought in that good, scary year of 1981. Aside from the body-stealing buggers and horny trees, Campbell and his friends were attacked by the scariest machine to hit the grass -- a particularly nasty Toro lawnmower. Oh yes, if you haven't heard about this before, he produced and co-starred in Josh Becker and Evil Dead II co-writer Scott Spiegel's short film called Toro. Toro. Toro!

While being used to mow a lawn at a cemetery, the lawnmower gets possessed and starts wreaking havoc on a town -- destroying shoes, people, and a particularly cream-pie-laden lawn party. This is the true Lawnmower Man. It's simple, goofy, and so very wonderfully '80s. It's also beyond me that Campbell hasn't made a lucrative career taking on roles as military men. Have you ever seen such depth brought to a role?! Enjoy!

Romania is still an inexpensive place to film a horror movie (just ask Charles Band, Elvira or Bruce Campbell), as well as place to stage more prestigious work; it has doubled for the Appalachians in Cold Mountain, and for India in the upcoming Youth Without Youth by Francis Ford Coppola. Their native film industry is far less known in the US. According to the Pacific Film Archives' Jason Sanders, Romania only makes six films a year. They're doing something right, or at least the Cannes Film Festival thinks so: Romanian films have won two Un Certain Regard awards, one Camera d'Or, and one Palme d'Or in the last three years.

At the Archives at UC Berkeley -- relatively central to the seven million residents of the San Francisco Bay Area -- the PFA is assembling a six-night program of Romanian films. If they have anything in common, it's telling about the trauma of the almost science-fiction evil of the Ceausescu dictatorship, and the tale of his hideo-comic downfall on Dec 22, 1989. The Paper Will Be Blue by Radu Muntean (Dec 2) stages the fear and excitement of the revolution in Romania as an urbane thriller; the Scorsese/Wim Wenders executive-produced The Way I Spent the End of the World (above) by Catalin Mitulescu (Nov 3) takes a more impressionistic, nostalgic approach.

Also making its California debut on Nov. 3 is California Dreamin' (Endless). It isn't called Endless because of a 155 minute running time, but rather because the director Cristian Nemescu died before the final edit. Armand Assante, recently the best part of American Gangster, if you ask me, plays a NATO Army Captain immobilized in a one-horse town by bureaucrats and hustlers. The Great Communist Bank Robbery (2004, Nov 25) concerns a really memorable Communist atrocity. After a 1959 bank robbery, the six who were arrested (guilty or not) were made to act in a reenactment film designed to show the Romanians that crime didn't pay; they were executed afterwards. Director Alexandru Solomon investigates this lost bit of history. Occident (Nov 17) is the first film by director Cristian Mungiu, whose still unreleased in our area 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days copped the Palme D'Or at Cannes 2007. And a series of short films on Nov 25 includes early work by Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, a Cannes winner in '05), and Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest, Camera d'Or winner 2006). Pretty soon you'll be able to have a quick answer to the question, "What's your favorite Romanian film?"

Okay... Before I get to the wonder that is Bruce Campbell, I've got to take a second and complain. If you remember anything about our previous coverage of Ghost Town, such as David Koepp signing on to direct Greg Kinnear and Ricky Gervais, Tea Leoni signing on, and then Kristen Wiig, you probably remember the premise. A dentist (Gervais) heads in for a colonoscopy under the knife of Wiig, and he dies for seven minutes. When he comes back to life, he can see the dead -- especially a ghostly businessman (Kinnear) who wants him to break up his widow's (Leoni) upcoming marriage.

Anal surgery is no longer the culprit. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the dentist temporarily kicks the bucket during a "routine dental surgery." Now that is a really boring and lame change. What's wrong with a colonoscopy? Gah. At least we've got Campbell to soften the news. He has signed on to play Leoni's character's fiance -- the one that the dentist really isn't into. Since this ghostly apparition isn't through Whoopi, I keep wondering if it'll end up with Kinnear taking over Gervais' body to have a second chance with his wife. Or maybe Campbell will go Ash on his ass and take him out of the picture. He could always just say Deadites possessed the dude. Shooting has already begun in New York, and hopefully they haven't vanilla-ed anything else.

Post edited as the original THR post now says "Billy Campbell" is the other man, and not Bruce. Thanks to ***Lance*** for spotting that. What a shame.

If you're coming late to the party for The Evil Dead, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. You may pop the movie into your DVD player, watch the first awkwardly-shot sequence, in which five friends drive to an isolated cabin in the woods, and giggle at how amateurish it looks. You may watch the next few scenes, in which the friends settle into the cabin, stumble upon an old tape recording, listen to a man on tape solemnly describing his discovery of an ancient Book of the Dead and how his wife turned into a demon and bodily dismemberment became necessary, and start to question why anyone would think this piece of crap was any kind of a horror classic.

But maybe you were amused by Bruce Campbell mugging as Ash, or noticed the myriad fresh camera angles presenting the action, or the extreme close-ups on eyes, or liked the low-budget aesthetic, and decided to give it a chance. And then one of the five friends wanders out into the woods, against all common sense, and the woods attack her -- yes, that's right, the woods attack her -- and she barely escapes back into the cabin, and then one by one the friends start turning into demons, and bodily dismemberment becomes a viable solution. And then you might say to yourself, "Ah, that's why."

Sam Raimi (writer/director), Robert Tapert (producer) and Bruce Campbell (actor/co-executive producer) had been making 8mm movies in Michigan before tackling their first feature, a micro-budget horror movie that they envisioned as a "quintessential drive-in movie," and The Evil Dead works best as a communal experience, where audiences tend to laugh at the amateurish seams, scream at the blood and gore, and then start laughing at the blood and gore simply because it's so over the top that laughter is the only appropriate response. But Raimi, especially, was disappointed that people laughed, because he intended to make a straightforward horror flick.

This list was harder than I thought. I honestly thought it would be easy to scrape up a handful of funny horror movies, or scary comedies, or even unintentionally funny, Ed Wood-type movies. But the more I started poking around, the more I discovered a healthy and thriving subgenre, packed with potential classics. This year's hilarious, disturbing Black Sheep is just one example, as well as Fido (which I missed). There were also many shades within this subgenre, ranging from flat-out comedies with supernatural elements (Beetlejuice, The Witches of Eastwick) to horror movies with just a hint of the absurd (The Invisible Man, An American Werewolf in London) to spoofs (Young Frankenstein, Scary Movie) So I stuck with my original impulse and went with the ones that I found the "funniest" that were actual "horror" movies. Oddly enough, most of my choices went -- arbitrarily -- to zombies. I guess vampires and ghosts just aren't as funny.

1. Shaun of the Dead (2004)
I've seen this four or five times now, and I just don't get sick of it. On a purely technical level, it moves beautifully, from the camera setups and tracking shots to the fluid editing. It's so well executed that the jokes are more or less imbedded within the film, rather than jumping out of the film, so that it remains funny each time. Some of the subtler jokes get better each time, such as Ed's "two seconds." What's even more amazing is how well it works as both a character-driven movie and a zombie movie. It's so good, it even earned the seal of approval from the zombie master, George A. Romero (the boys, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, went on to make cameos in Romero's Land of the Dead).

2. Army of Darkness (1992)
The debate rages on around Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy: which one is best? I love them all, and Evil Dead II is my admitted favorite, but this third entry -- at one time entitled "Medieval Dead" -- is definitely the funniest. Bruce Campbell earned himself a lifelong cult following with his deadpan readings of lines like "boom stick," "primitive screwheads," "gimme some sugar, baby," etc. The drawback is that this film is definitely the least scary of the three films, but it does have its share of monsters, gore and creepy Harryhausen-like effects.

There's been trouble in Bubba paradise for a while now. In June, Bruce Campbell knew nothing about the Bubba Ho-Tep sequel, Bubba Nosferatu. A few days ago, Paul Giamatti said that ol' Elvis was "waffling" on the idea. Now, it's time to put Bubba Campbell dreams to bed, because Bruce has out and out said he won't be involved. The actor recently appeared on Fangoria Radio, and said: "[Bubba Nosferatu] is dead to me. It sleeps with the fishes. Don Coscarelli is a very passionate filmmaker. We got to a few points [developing the screenplay] that we couldn't reconcile. I want to keep our friendship, so we parted ways. So, I'm not part of that project."

One would imagine that no Bruce would mean the end of things, but the director told Fangoria that he might recast the movie with someone else the fans would embrace, but recognizes the challenge in that. First, I don't think there is anyone who could make the fans not miss Campbell in the sequins. They could come up with an entirely different character and use the same theme, but what Bubba fan will be cool with a replacement Elvis? Second, what on earth is in that script that threatened Campbell's relationship with Coscarelli and made Ash walk? If he's that unhappy with the filmmakers vision, would we be any happier?

In case you were looking for more fan dreams to be quashed -- he's also kiboshed the other sequels right now. There will be no Freddy-Jason-Ash mashup: "It blows! You really think Ash would be allowed to kill Freddy and Jason off?" There will be no fourth Evil Dead for now: "Raimi still talks about it, but he's in no rush to do it with everything else he has going on. Sam jokes: 'Maybe we can do another Evil Dead when we're 70.'" And finally, no Evil Dead remake: "The feedback from the fans was 90 percent negative. It's going nowhere. The remake has fizzled fast at Sam's company." So, there you have it. Any new Campbell that you see for the time being will have to be via Burn Notice.