My Name is Bruce (2006/2007/2008?)

At this point, I’m starting to believe that Bruce Campbell is a better writer than he is filmmaker. While My Name is Bruce is somewhat better than his first film, The Man with the Screaming Brain, it’s still a bit rough to sit through. Neither of his films captures that weird glee of the Evil Dead films, nor of the more obscure Detroit film crew efforts of Intruder or Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except…. Try as they may, they do not. Which is strange, because both of his books capture that feeling better than the two feature films he has directed.

My Name is Bruce is a comedy-horror take on the film of the same name from the 1970s starring Bruce Lee (yes, the comedy comes first in this one). Mr. Campbell plays a more exaggerated version of “himself” which is supposed to be a more exaggerated version of his most popular character, Ash from the Evil Dead series. He is a drunk, rude, obnoxious, selfish bastard and generally a jerk to his co-workers, and stereotypical fans. After a goofy looking goth kid/Bruce Campbell megafan unleashes an ancient Chinese demon onto his town of Gold Lick, Oregon, he kidnaps Mr. Campbell thinking that he is the only person who can save the town. Campbell, on the other hand, thinks this is all one weird surprise birthday set-up orchestrated by his agent Mills (Ted Raimi, in one of his three roles in the entire movie). When he is proven wrong, he reacts in a typical Ash-fashion.

Hearing about the movie for a couple of years before it came out, I thought the plotline of a fan or town confusing Campbell for Ash would be much more prominent than it actually was in the end result, perhaps as a commentary on how certain people or fans genuinely do confuse a character with the actor who plays them. The stronger plotline is Bruce trying to be the biggest jerk possible, and then trying to be slightly less jerky and heroic, which gets a tad boring after the first 30 minutes. The first 30 minutes are actually pretty funny and features the most skewering of Campbell. What brought the film to a distracting, crazy halt is when Ted Raimi is introduced into his third role as Gold Lick’s sole Chinese person, and the last town descendent of the people who brought about the demon in the cemetary. He gives a long expositiony speech in the middle of the movie, and I was so distracted by the fact that a white man was playing a Chinese man that I don’t even know what he said. I know this film was low-budget, and completely shot on Campbell’s ranch in Oregon (which that particular result is not as bad as it could have been – I guess Campbell has a pretty large ranch), but couldn’t he have found an actual Chinese-American to play the part? Since Raimi also plays the town’s sole Italian, I get the feeling that casting Raimi in roles that require ethnic stereotypes with bad accents is some sort of weird inside joke or is some product of a really old sense of humor, since he was also in The Man with the Screaming Brain playing a bumbling hip-hop obsessed Bulgarian man who dressed like a member of Kris Kross. It’s a sense of humor I don’t really understand. Campbell does this to an extent in his books as well. In Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, Richmond, VA is depicted as a total Southern stereotype where bumbling Bruce makes his way into a secret society of men who long for the old ways of the South, and who brutally beat him once they find out that he’s from Detroit. I don’t think people like that exist to that exaggeration around here anymore. Even the ones that do to a small extent now mostly live in the counties outside the city, not in it. I’ll forego a rant on the voting statistics on the city of Richmond. But honestly? I swear that I see more rebel flags when I drive slightly north to Maryland and Pennsylvania than I do in Central Virginia. I still recommend the book though, it’s a fun book. In the right hands, it would make a good, high-concept movie, actually. My Name is Bruce however, is probably only worth a peek if you really like Bruce Campbell and feel the need to support him. At this point, I’d say his best movie is the short documentary he made called Fanalysis, which was attached to the “Book of the Dead” DVD release of Evil Dead earlier this decade.

If anyone can clarify the exact year this film was released, let me know. IMDB says 2007, Netflix says 2006, and my memory of horror blogs posting about the film touring around the country says late 2008. I know it took a couple of years to come out.