No, not Elvis as a semi-vampire, which seems (am I wrong?) to be the idea in Don Coscarelli‘s forthcoming Bubba Nosferatu.
I’m sorry but my Space Elvis idea (i.e., a script I wrote ages ago) is better: Elvis was kidnapped by aliens in August 1977 just before he died, and flown back to the aliens’ home planet. He was restored, cleaned up, de-drugged, probed, kept in a large home (facsimile of Graceland) for 32 years, and then returned to earth in 2009 as the same 42 year-old he was before only much thinner and full of vim and vigor and ready to rock out. Except nobody believes he’s the real Elvis (naturally) so the only gig he can get is performing as an Elvis impersonator.
AICN’s Quint recently spoke about Bubba Nosferatu to Paul GIamatti, who will play Colonel Tom Parker to Ron Perlman‘s Elvis Presley. Ron Perlman? This isn’t going to work.
I saw Coscarelli’s Bubba Ho-Tep at Cinevegas three or four years ago, and it was immediately clear to me that Coscarelli is a great idea man but not much of a filmmaker. The movie was slow, not well shot, the absurdity of the plot overwhelmed the versimilitude, it had no story tension, it felt cheesy, etc.
Giamatti shared some of the details in the Quint interview. “I don’t want to give too much of it away! So yeah, I’ll be playing Col. Parker, who.. You know part of the great thing about this is not only are these wonderful genre movies, but he’s actually taking a weird, interesting take on the whole Elvis myth and kind of investigating the whole Elvis myth in a really interesting way, so it’s got a lot of stuff about Col. Parker being responsible for a lot of what happened to Elvis and kind of literally making him a vampire in some ways, you know? A kind of a blood sucker
“It plays on a lot of things, this movie, in a great way and it’s got Sitting Bull in it and there’s a peyote trip in it that is amazing and it’s just a big leap beyond the other movie. It’s ten times more insane and bizarre and it’s great and hilarious, too. It’s funnier than the other one is even. It still ends up being this great character study of this Elvis guy.”