#28, 29
Bubba Hotep (2002, dir. Don Coscarelli)
Nomads (1986, dir. John McTiernan)
"Come and get it, you undead sack of shit."Bruce Campbell makes Bubba Hotep. No offense to Ossie Davis, he was great in it too, but try to imagine some rando instead of Bruce Campbell and it's shit. You put Bruce Campbell in talking about a growth on his pecker and how it's been two presidential elections since he's had a hard-on, and it's gold. This is one of those "I don't know how this even got made, I'm just glad it did" movies. 4 Dog Dick of Anubis' out of 5.
"We are so very far from home, you know. All of us. We have wandered so very far from home."Nomads was a movie I didn't know very much about at all. It's directed by John McTiernan just before he did Predator, and stars Pierce Brosnan as a French anthropologist who's spent years living among and studying nomadic cultures, but decides to settle down and take a teaching job at UCLA for the sake of his wife. The first night at his new house, he discovers a street gang loitering around near his house and graffiti on his garage. Inside his garage, he finds a memorial to a murder that was committed in his house before he bought it, and more graffiti saying that the killer was a hero. He downplays the vandalism to his wife, telling her it was just some kids and they don't need to call the police, and instead he starts spying on the gang. They remind him of the nomadic tribes that he lived with, and so he starts following them around town and photographing them. After 30 straight hours of following them, he realizes that they don't seem to sleep or have a home, just traveling from one side of the city to other in their van. He goes back to his house and develops the film he took of them, only to discover that it's all blank.
All this is actually told in a flashback. The movie starts out with Pierce Brosnan's character, Pommier dying in a hospital ER. He was extremely panicked and rambling in French before finally the life just seemed to go out of him. His whispered something to the ER doctor on the scene, Flax, and the next day she starts having visions of Pommier's last week of life, reliving and acting out everything he saw and did. While she's trying to piece together what happened to Pommier and what his last words meant, she sees a vision of Pommier being chased around the city by the hoods in the black van and hiding out in an abandoned church, where he meets a nun who tells him that the people chasing him are not people, they merely take on human form and that most people will never see them or if they do see them, will never think twice about it. But now that he's become aware of them and they've become aware of him, the only thing to do is leave the city and run as far away as possible. The gang is actually a group of demonic spirits that he first learned about when he was living with the Inuit people. They feed on human souls and they're drawn to places of death and misery, in this case, his house where a murder took place.
Pommier goes home and tries to get his wife and escape, but and this point his sainty was already slipping away and wasn't able to escape the nomads, eventually winding up in the hospital and ultimately dead. Flax, still following Pommier's memories, goes to Pommier's house and tries to fullfill his last wish by getting his wife away from the house. While Flax tries to explain to his wife what's happening and that they need to leave, the nomads show up and start attacking the house. Flax and Pommier's wife hide in the attic, but eventually one of the nomads smashes through the attic door and begins to menace them, as Flax breaks down sobbing. Ultimately, it was content to merely terrorize them for now, and eventually the nomads leave after trashing the entire house. The two women leave the house and start driving as far and as fast as they can.
Several hours later, Flax was asleep in the back seat of the car and awakens as a black motorcycle with a black clad rider pulls along beside them. Fearing that it's another one of the nomads, she tells the other lady to keep driving and don't stop no matter what happens. The biker drives in front of them, takes off his helmet, and looks back, revealing that it is Pommier, his soul taken by the nomads and now one of them. The car races ahead, crossing the California state line, and Pommier turns back and drives away, seemingly at the edge of his haunting range. All in all, pretty dece movie. 3 French Remmington Steeles out of 5.