A Year of Bad Movies # 10 — “My Name is Bruce”
My Name is Bruce (2007)
IMDB Score: 6.7 out of 10
Metacritic Score: 36 out of 100
Rotten Tomatoes: 41 out of 100
As any readers may have noticed, I’ve fallen a bit behind on my lofty goal of watching a year of bad movies.
One of my coolest moments from college was interviewing Bruce Campbell for my school paper. It was an e-mail interview, but cool nonetheless.
A busy work schedule has kept me from watching a movie a week and weekend activities have prevented me from catching up on my free time.
Well, enough is enough. It’s time to get back on track and tonight I will be taking the first step in that direction by watching approximately 17 hours of bad movies. I won’t be entirely caught up by tomorrow morning, but I’ll be a whole lot closer to my goal then I am today.
It’s currently 9 p.m. and I decided to start my marathon movie watching session with a film by one of my favorite actors from my childhood: Bruce Campbell.
“My Name is Bruce” turned out to be the perfect movie to begin the night’s festivities with — a bad movie about bad movies.
Bruce Campbell, who also directed the film, stars as himself, a B-movie actor famous for making some of the worst movies known to mankind. Down on his luck and more then a little dependent on the sauce, the film’s exaggerated version of Campbell is a complete asshole.
In what is essentially a coming-of-actor movie, Campbell is kidnapped by a dedicated fan and tricked into fighting a real-life monster that is plaguing a small mining community.
Bruce Campbell’s dedication to the part and willingness to throw everything he has on the screen makes the film more then enjoyable for those that are already fans of his work. Unfortunately, a terrible script, unbelievably bad acting from his co-stars and cheesy special effects firmly plant this movie alongside the rest of Campbell’s growing library of bad movies.
But that’s exactly how it should be.
Campbell has never been one to shy away from his role as the King of B-Movies. I don’t feel I’m alone in saying that Campbell’s acting chops could have (and perhaps should have) taken him far in Hollywood. He could have been a big action star (or at least the next William Shatner).
For whatever reason, though, he has built a career out of bad made-for-Sci-Fi-Channel movies.
It’s only fitting that a movie in which he stars as a version of himself mistaken for the characters he plays in bad b-movies should in fact be a bad b-movie.
“My Name is Bruce” knows exactly who it’s audience is: people who like more-then-slightly racist Chinese stereotypes played by Ted Rami, goth kids who grew up idolizing Ash from “Evil Dead,” Internet geeks who can quote Campbell like English majors can quote Dickens and every other aficionado of bad movies currently browsing their local comic book store’s bootleg bin.
Only an actor truly comfortable in his place in Hollywood could parody himself as perfectly as Campbell has done. Campbell knows who his fans are and is willing to give something back that he knows they will enjoy.
Maybe that’s what I learned from my first movie in tonight’s bad movie marathon — know thy fans and thou will know thyself.
Since I have no fans, I guess I’m stuck wallowing in my cesspool of self-doubt and awkwardness. Maybe someday I can become like Bruce Campbell, though. And that, my future fans, would be groovy.
