'My Name is Bruce' (2007) - the missing link?

[Aclea]

I rather enjoyed it myself:



"The customer reviews on Amazon were great."
"Yeah, the ones YOU posted."

There are two kinds of moviegoers in the world: those who get Bruce Campbell, and those who sail through life blissfully unaware of his existence. My Name is Bruce is made purely for the former and the latter probably need not apply. Not that they might not find it amusing, but it's much funnier if you're aware of his extensive resume of straight-to-video schlocker horrors cashing in on his fading Evil Dead notoriety and can get the in-jokes both in script and casting. The gargantuan chinned Bob Hope of Z movies plays himself as an egomaniacal drunken washed up actor making sequels to unwatchable monster movies by day and stealing the Jack Daniels from his dog's bowl in his rundown trailer by night, making drunken phone calls to his ex-wife and bemoaning the loss of his 'muse' while TV shows rub salt in the wounds by running `whatever happened to?' features about his career. Salvation comes forward, however, when teenagers unwittingly unleash Guan-Di, the Chinese God of War, protector of the dead and patron saint of bean curd, on the unwitting population of dead-end mining town Gold Lick, and Campbell's greatest fan kidnaps him to vanquish the sword-wielding entity before it can decapitate all the blood relatives of the original townsfolk. Only Bruce thinks the whole thing is a put-on job arranged by his agent as a birthday present... But hey, he's made movies in Bulgaria, he's ready for anything.

It's pretty much Three Amigos for the straight-to-DVD era, albeit with only one amigo and an undead villain; it's certainly a one joke movie. But since the joke is Bruce Campbell and his entire career, and Campbell's in on the joke as he fires out the kind of self-deprecating one-liners Bob Hope made a career out of it works much better than it has any right to, filled with scathing jabs at the director/star's ego, the contempt he's held in by the industry (when he doesn't turn up on set they simply use a stuffed dummy) and his somewhat worrying fanbase of geeks, nerds and losers - the very people the movie is made for. While the film certainly doesn't have the depth of Campbell's finest hour, Bubba Ho-Tep, and it never really hits the heights, it's unpretentious and good-natured fun that goes down easily enough. Parts of it don't work - a comic dance sequence in the local bar is clumsily botched in all the wrong ways - but enough of it does to give it a free pass for the occasional stumbles. It may not be the future classic it wants to be, but it's a lovingly crafted love letter to the Chin.