JimK:  We spent a lot of time at the movie theater last night…we saw My Name Is Bruce twice.  Sure…a horror movie starring Bruce Campbell, directed by Bruce Campbell, that is about a fictionalized Bruce Campbell and shot basically at Bruce Campbell’s house should in fact be more than enough for anyone to say they had a great night out.  Seeing it twice would simply be doubling your pleasure.  Getting to talk to the man himself both times after seeing his movie?  Yeah…that was nothing short of awesome.

I think before anything else we need to get the movie review out of the way.  My Name Is Bruce is a B-grade horror flick made for about eleven dollars.  The story is of one Mr. Bruce Campbell, an actor of some fame and reputation (most of it bad) and also the star of many a terrible horror flick.  His agent is kind of useless, but when the agent promises Bruce a birthday surprise…Campbell decides not to fire him.  They get hammered.  In the middle of the night, a superfan, confusing Bruce for an actual action hero, comes knocking on the door, bonks Bruce on the head and brings him to Gold Lick, a town under siege by Guan-Di, defender of dead Chinese souls and bean curd.  Bruce thinks this is all an elaborate birthday surprise.  It’s not.  Madness ensues.

The trailer:

Okay, look, no one is going to mistake this for Citizen Kane, least of all Bruce Campbell.  My Name Is Bruce doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a fun, terrible romp through the classic horror tropes straight out of Campbell’s own filmography.  Fake trees, bad fog, racial and class stereotypes, decapitations, hands getting cut off, spoofs within spoofs…it’s all here.  This is the perfect Halloween-time movie…when it comes out on DVD, put it with Maniac Cop and the first Evil Dead and you got yourself one hell of a night of great bad movies.

Bruce being himself (only with the volume turned up to eleven) aside, and Ted Raimi hamming it up as three different people (that I recognized) notwithstanding, there was a surprise acting standout in this movie.  Grace Thorsen, who does not have a lot of credits on her IMDB page

, was surprisingly natural and sort of…good.  She seemed very much like a professional actress adrift in a sea of unadulterated scenery chewing hams.  Yes, I include Bruce among those hams.  Come on!  The guy is brilliant at that thing he does…that thing just so happens to be being a huge ham that out-hams any other ham that may attempt a ham-off in this or any other ham-filled movie.

I remember thinking that there were two other reasons why Grace Thorsen stood out in this film, but for the life of me I cannot put my fingers on them, no matter how much I’d like to….and speaking of which, like all great B-movie schlock horror flicks, this one has a scene you’ll never forget.  Just think about a mad Chinese god of war, a sharp blade and a horny teen cupping his date’s boob in a cemetery.  It’s the last thing that hand will ever feel. 

Lastly, that damn song…the mayor and the sheriff sing a different verse of a ballad about Guan-Di three times during the movie, and the chorus will stick with me forever.  “Guan-Di is his name…Guan-you, Guan-me, Guan-Di…Guan-Di is his name.”

Bottom line is, if you are a Bruce Campbell fan, or you love schlocky horror, or you just want to turn off your brain and laugh and see some raspberry jam stand in for blood & gore…go see this movie if it comes to your town.  You may even get to talk to the man himself!  More on that in a minute.

JimK:  So this is how I found out about the whole “getting to talk to Bruce Campbell thing.  I was at some site that linked to a story at Cinematical where the writer spoke to Bruce at a My name Is Bruce screening…whaa-whaa-whaaa?  Bruce is doing Q&A after the movie?  Is that coming to my town?  I hit up BruceCampbell.com and find the page…and oh my, the man is coming to Hartford on Nov. 9th!  WOOHOO.  I plan to tell Donna later.  Then my car broke down and this weekend was whatever and I totally forgot until…Monday the 10th.

NOOOOOOOOO111!!1!11oneomgponies.

For reasons known only to my little fanboy brain, I never read past the Hartford date on Bruce’s site.  I didn’t see that he was going to be right in my damn backyard - like seven minutes from my house - three days later!  No one at the theater seemed to know exactly which screenings he would be at when I called, so I bought tickets for the 7:15 and the 10:00 thinking if he wasn’t at the earlier one we could leave and come back.  We stayed and we got to see him both times.  Due to my HORRIBLE GOD-DAMNED CAMERA’S horrible god-damned video capabilities, I got nothing usable from the 7:15 Q&A.  And since my phone is also god-damned terrible at taking video, I barely got anything from the second one, I got about half of the Q&A…what I did get is below.  Sorry for the shit video.  If you want better, you should buy me a Flip.