Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to American Movies about the Film Industry
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My Name Is Bruce (2007)
Bruce Campbell has made a career out of making fun of himself. He’s the king of self-parody with a keen understanding and appreciation of the ridiculousness of his life and career. Campbell is a self-deprecating goofball, a post-modern B movie icon who is forever in on the joke.
With 2007’s My Name is Bruce, Campbell is both in on the joke and the disseminator of the joke, since he both directs and stars as a fictionalized version of himself as a booze-sodden, skirt-chasing, profane has been who hates himself and his fans with a white-hot burning passion.
This version of Campbell isn’t just drunk and dissolute. He’s also a raging idiot but the small town of Gold Lick is so desperate for a hero to take on Guan Di, a murderous Chinese demon who has been killing townspeople as revenge for a long-ago mining disaster that took the lives of 100 workers, that a young super-fan abducts him so he can take on the blood-thirsty monster.
Campbell obliviously assumes that he’s in a movie that his agent has arranged as a surprise despite the glaring lack of a director or anything else you’d find on a film set.
The titular star may not be the best actor in the world but he’s tough to beat when it comes to self-spoofery.
Campbell has a blast satirizing his cornball image. My Name is Bruce has an ingratiatingly homemade quality that sometimes veers into amateurishness. It’s cheap even by the standards of a Bruce Campbell movie and cursed with an unfortunate yellowface turn by Ted Raimi, who plays multiple roles. My Name is Bruce is the ultimate fan film. It’s about a Bruce Campbell fan with delusional faith in his hero that’s also pretty much for Bruce Campbell fans and Bruce Campbell fans only. But what red-blooded b-movie lover doesn’t dig the Evil Dead star?
The Last Horror Film (1982) FM
The ineffably unnerving character actor Joe Spinell looked like he had grease and oil instead of blood pumping through his veins. In the 1982 exploitation movie The Last Horror Film the prolific character actor plays Vinny Durand, the ugliest of ugly Americans. The Maniac star inhabits the clammy skin and disturbed mind of a deranged New York cab driver obsessed with scream queen Jana Bates (Spinell’s Maniac costar Caroline Munro).
When the actress travels to the Cannes Film Festival to compete for the Best Actress award against the likes of Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep for her new terror tale Scream the sweaty creep with the face even a mother couldn’t love decides to take a Gallic holiday.
What the lovestruck cab driver really wants to do is direct. He wants to collaborate with his favorite actress on the ultimate terror tale so he stalks the object of his affection throughout the festival. Soon people connected to Jana and Scream end up dead. Some cynical souls assume that the disappearances are nothing more than a cynical publicity stunt to promote Jana’s new film. But Jana is terrified that her life is in danger.
The Last Horror Film was shot without permits at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. Like every movie filmed at Cannes The Last Horror Movie doubles as a fascinating time capsule/sociological document of the era it chronicles with grisly abandon and unrelenting sleaze. Images of posters for movies like My Dinner with Andre and For Your Eyes Only and glamorous celebrities at gala events are money shots as much, if not more, than a slew of graphic murders.
At its best this lurid pop artifact suggests a grindhouse version of Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, with Larry as a low rent, Z-movies version of Rupert Pupkin or Travis Bickle.
John Hinkley’s Taxi Driver-inspired shooting of Ronald Reagan is referenced throughout in a movie-mad exploitation movie that has a lot more going for it than most bloodbaths. It doesn’t quite work but it’s a distinctive, trippy and ultimately mind-melting mess.