The Rodeo

Elvis and John F. Kennedy team up to save a nursing home from an ancient Egyptian mummy .

It wasn’t as good as I was expecting, and Jen pretty much hated it.

Bruce Campbell is an excellent Elvis, he does a great job of portraying an old, zimmer-frame bearing Elvis Presley. You can really believe that it is actually the King wandering around the nursing home.

Ossie Davis is JFK. Yes, he is black. The justification for this had both Jen and I in stitches for ages, one of two really funny points in the movie (the other is the translation of the heiroglyph graffiti in the visitor’s toilet).

The basic synopsis of the movie is as follows: Elvis switches places with an impersonator and then breaks his hip, landing him in a nursing home. Jack says he is the former US president, dyed black, with a bag of sand in his head, convinced Lyndon Johnson is trying to kill him. Maybe he is… we’ll probably never know for sure. The two of them join forces to hunt down and kill an ancient Egyptian mummy that is sucking the nursing home’s residents’ souls out through their buttocks. That’s about it. Wierd, but sounds like my kind of film.

The movie was seriously let down by it’s fascination with Elvis’… um, little Elvis, and the pus-filled growth thereon. The opening lines in the movie basically put Jen off completely and set the tone for the whole movie. It’s pretty crude, although there are some genuinely funny moments in there too. There are also a few very touching moments, and some fantastic acting by all involved, but in the end it all just didn’t grab me as it could have.

Would I recommend it? Probably not. The few good lines are great, but the rest of the movie just isn’t as wonderful as I’d hoped. The fact that I heard only good things about it back in 2002, combined with three years of waiting for it to finally arrive in Australia meant that the hype that had built around it just wasn’t matched by the final product.

RodeoClown: is Taking Care of Business (T.C.B. baby!)

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