I really like Bruce Campbell, and this is very much the movie I would expect of him (unlike the disappointing and dreary BubbaHo_Tep); it's bright breezy and self-deprecating.
Bruce plays himself as an obnoxious drunk churning out bad horror movies and living in a trailer. His dreary life is upset when a town decides his years as a horror movie star qualify him to destroy a real monster that is decapitating the residents.
If you've seen many of those old Bob Hope movies in which a bumbling idiot winds up being mistaken for a private detective or a spy then this will seem familiar, and in spite of the horror-movie approach, this is very much in the style of those old Hope comedies. It's not as funny as "My Favorite Brunette," but it's still quite amusing.
The main problem with this movie is the premise doesn't quite work, and that is entirely the filmmakers' fault. For a town full of people to believe a B-movie actor can kill a monster, you need either a town of gullible backwoods mouth-breathers or something that makes it look convincing to ordinary people. The Hope movies tended to be good at this, creating a reasonable beginning that made the story make sense, even though realistically people should have caught on because Hope's character was such an idiot.
But in this movie, the town is made up of perfectly normal, reasonable intelligent people who all inexplicably take the word of a teenager that this is a good idea. And even the teenager doesn't seem that dumb, just obsessed. It's as though the movie were written under the assumption that everyone in town was an idiot, but at the same time they all liked the idea of Bruce being the obnoxious idiot in a town of nice people. And you can't do both of those.
It's a shame, because if they'd made it a town of idiots, with the sexy girl the only one with any sense, you would have had a movie that both made more sense and that had more opportunities for comedy.
But in spite of its story flaws, I quite enjoyed this.
Bruce plays himself as an obnoxious drunk churning out bad horror movies and living in a trailer. His dreary life is upset when a town decides his years as a horror movie star qualify him to destroy a real monster that is decapitating the residents.
If you've seen many of those old Bob Hope movies in which a bumbling idiot winds up being mistaken for a private detective or a spy then this will seem familiar, and in spite of the horror-movie approach, this is very much in the style of those old Hope comedies. It's not as funny as "My Favorite Brunette," but it's still quite amusing.
The main problem with this movie is the premise doesn't quite work, and that is entirely the filmmakers' fault. For a town full of people to believe a B-movie actor can kill a monster, you need either a town of gullible backwoods mouth-breathers or something that makes it look convincing to ordinary people. The Hope movies tended to be good at this, creating a reasonable beginning that made the story make sense, even though realistically people should have caught on because Hope's character was such an idiot.
But in this movie, the town is made up of perfectly normal, reasonable intelligent people who all inexplicably take the word of a teenager that this is a good idea. And even the teenager doesn't seem that dumb, just obsessed. It's as though the movie were written under the assumption that everyone in town was an idiot, but at the same time they all liked the idea of Bruce being the obnoxious idiot in a town of nice people. And you can't do both of those.
It's a shame, because if they'd made it a town of idiots, with the sexy girl the only one with any sense, you would have had a movie that both made more sense and that had more opportunities for comedy.
But in spite of its story flaws, I quite enjoyed this.