Beyond Evil Dead: Some of Bruce Campbell’s Best Non-Ash Roles

Cody

Earlier this week, legendary actor Bruce Campbell shared some troubling news with his fans and followers: he has been diagnosed with “a type of cancer that’s treatable, not curable,” and will be undergoing treatment over the coming months. Thankfully, as he says, “I am a tough old son-of-a-bitch and I have great support, so I expect to be around a while.” And in an effort to stir up as much well-wishes and good vibes for him as I can, I have looked back over his career and picked out some of his best roles.

Since he is best known for his work playing the hero Ash in the Evil Dead franchise, I have left those excellent movies and TV show off the list, because we all know them already!

MANIAC COP (1988)

Here’s something unfortunate: when Bruce Campbell talks about Maniac Cop, he makes it quite clear that he’s not aware he’s talking about one of the coolest and most underrated horror movies of the 1980s. He brushes the movie off and mocks the script by Larry Cohen – but Maniac Cop is awesome, and the best horror movie we’ve ever gotten with a St. Patrick’s Day setting.

Directed by William Lustig, the film blends slasher horror with police thriller elements as New York City is terrorized by a uniformed killer who turns out to be the vengeful undead cop Matt Cordell, played by Robert Z’Dar. While much of the investigation is led by hard-boiled detective Frank McCrae (Tom Atkins), the focus eventually shifts to flawed and desperate officer Jack Forrest (Campbell), who is framed for murder and forced to confront the killer to clear his name. Campbell was surrounded with a strong supporting cast, including Laurene Landon and Richard Roundtree, and the film has a dark, noir-like atmosphere. It launched a franchise, with Maniac Cop 2 being one of the rare slasher sequels that surpasses its predecessor… despite the fact that it has much less Campbell in it.

SUNDOWN: THE VAMPIRE IN RETREAT (1989)

The horror comedy Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat, directed by Anthony Hickox, is a quirky, entertaining movie that deserves more attention. It takes place in the desert town of Purgatory, where Count Mardulak (David Carradine) has gathered the last remaining vampires to live in isolation under the protection of hats, sunblock, and UV-protected glass. He’s also working on getting a fake blood synthesizing plant up and running in hopes that his kind will no longer have to feed on humans; they’ll be able to live in harmony with them. Unfortunately, there’s a group of vampires in town who don’t like that plan. They’re ready to resort to violence to make sure that the idea of existing on synthesized blood doesn’t go through. Armed with guns that fire wooden bullets, they’re going to stand up for their right to feed on humans.

There’s a lot going on in Sundown, with a vampire civil war taking up the last 40 minutes or so, and Bruce Campbell doesn’t have a lead role like we know he should. He’s a small part of the ensemble, playing vampire hunter Robert Van Helsing in an adorably goofy, dorky, and quite amusing way. Most of his scenes involve interactions with vampire Sandy White, who’s played by Deborah Foreman of Valley Girl and April Fool’s Day – and that is a major selling point for me because Campbell and Foreman are two of my favorite actors. (They would share the screen again a couple of years later in Lunatics: A Love Story.) The ensemble also includes Maxwell Caulfield, M. Emmet Walsh, Jim Metzler, Morgan Brittany, John Ireland, and Dana Ashbrook, among others.

THE ADVENTURES OF BRISCO COUNTY, JR. (1993 – 1994)

One of the great disappointments in television history is the fact that the “weird Western” series The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. only lasted for one season on Fox and we’ve never gotten any follow-ups of any sort, in any medium. But at least we have these twenty-seven episodes of greatness to go back to and enjoy repeatedly.

The show was commissioned in response to the success of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. A Fox executive tasked that film’s screenwriter, Jeffrey Boam, and his collaborator Carlton Cuse with developing a TV series inspired, like the Indiana Jones franchise was, by vintage movie serials. Since many of those serials were either Westerns or sci-fi, Boam and Cuse decided to blend the genres together, telling the story of lawyer-turned-bounty hunter Brisco County, Jr. (that’s Campbell’s role), who’s on the trail of the outlaw who murdered his father. Brisco is supervised by lawyer Socrates Poole (Christian Clemenson), in competition with bounty hunter Lord Bowler (Julius Carry), and has a love interest in con artist Dixie Cousins (Kelly Rutherford). The show combined classic Western elements with steampunk and out-of-time technology, a dash of time travel, and a whole lot fun, and Campbell proved to be a great TV star. The show was expected to be the breakout hit of the year, but the ratings weren’t there, so it was cancelled when, based on the quality, it truly deserved to go on for multiple seasons.

TORNADO! (1996)

I’ll admit, this one is pure nostalgia for me. You’ve seen Twister. You’ve seen Twisters. But have you seen the mockbuster Tornado!, which premiere on Fox just days before Twister reached theatres in 1996? I tuned in to catch that premiere and thoroughly enjoyed watching Bruce Campbell chase storms in one of the better TV movies of the time.

Directed by Noel Nosseck and written by future Oscar nominee John Logan, Tornado! follows a team of storm chasers in Texas attempting to deploy a scientific device into a tornado to collect data that could improve early warning systems. You know, the exact same story as Twister, but in Texas instead of Oklahoma. Campbell plays Jake Thorne, a storm chaser who’s not as cool or funny as Ash, but he’s a good lead in his own right. The film is short (83 minutes) and simple, and exactly what you’d expect from a TV equivalent to Twister. It’s not quite as exciting as the blockbuster version of the story and the effects aren’t as dazzling, but it provides a good time, and Campbell had a strong supporting cast. Shannon Sturges holds her own while bouncing dialogue back and forth with him as his love interest, and it’s always nice to see Ernie Hudson and L.Q. Jones in action. Jones’ Ephram, Jake’s grandfather, has a dark history with tornadoes and is basically the film’s equivalent to Dr. Loomis from Halloween or Quint from Jaws (and therefore Captain Ahab from Moby Dick), going on a rant about a tornado, the monster that ate his world, being “God’s blind fury” and having “a devil’s heart and a dead soul.”

RUNNING TIME (1997)

Inspired by the single-take illusion of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, writer/director Josh Becker pushed the concept further with Running Time, adding a “ticking clock” time element into his story and expanding the scope. He crafted a low-budget crime story that unfolds in real time as the camera follows characters across a city, with hidden cuts masked by movement. To avoid glaring color and lighting changes, the movie was shot in black & white. Campbell plays Carl, a man who’s just getting out of prison after serving five years. He’s picked up by his old friend Patrick, who has gotten him the “welcome back” gift of some time with a prostitute – who turns out to Carl’s high school flame Janie. Carl and Janie reconnect, but they don’t have much time. Carl and Patrick have some place to be within 25 minutes of him walking out of the prison gates. This destination is a heist worth $250,000. Do you think everything goes as planned? Hint: you can spot one of the cuts just by the fact that droplets of blood disappear from the camera lens.

Shot in ten days for $120,000, Running Time is a well-executed, interesting experiment in filmmaking/editing and a good, fast-paced crime drama.

JACK OF ALL TRADES (2000)

Sam Raimi’s production company Renaissance Pictures was behind the popular syndicated TV shows Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, both of which feature Campbell in multiple episodes as a character named Autolycus. By 2000, Hercules had ended and Xena was winding down, so they tried to replicate the success of those shows with the sci-fi series Cleopatra 2525 and the action comedy Jack of All Trades, which had half-hour episodes that were often paired together as the Back2Back Action Hour. It didn’t work; both shows quickly sputtered out. But at least Jack of Trades gave us twenty-two episodes of amusing Bruce Campbell action before it faded into obscurity.

Bruce plays American secret agent Jack Stiles, who is sent to the French-controlled island of Pulau-Pulau by President Jefferson in 1801 so he can plot against Napoleon and thwart other threats against the United States – often while dressed up as a masked hero called the Daring Dragoon, and aided by English spy Emilia Rothschild (Angela Dotchin). This serves as both a recommendation and a reminder to myself that this show existed and I haven’t watched all of its episodes yet.

BUBBA HO-TEP (2002)

Based on the novella by Joe R. Lansdale and directed by Don Coscarelli, Bubba Ho-Tep may be the film Campbell is best known for outside of the Evil Dead franchise. It takes an absurd premise of an elderly man in a Texas nursing home who insists he’s Elvis Presley teaming up with a resident who believes he’s John F. Kennedy to battle a soul-sucking mummy and turns it into something unexpectedly heartfelt. At the center of the film, Campbell delivers what may be the best performance of his career while buried beneath an Elvis wig, sunglasses, and old-age makeup.

Campbell’s Elvis is tired and reflective, grappling with regret and mortality… and dealing with the fact that he has a growth on his pecker. While the story is packed with comedy and thrills, Campbell grounds it with surprising emotional depth, making his Elvis feel human rather than a parody. In a better world, this would have earned him an Oscar nomination.

MY NAME IS BRUCE (2007)

In My Name Is Bruce, which Bruce Campbell also directed and produced from a script by Mark Verheiden, Campbell parodies his own B-movie legacy by playing a washed-up, egotistical, hard-drinking version of himself who is mistakenly believed to be a real-life monster hunter. A devoted fan kidnaps him and brings him to the tiny town of Gold Lick, Oregon, hoping this movie hero can save the town from the scythe-wielding spirit of Guan-Di, a Chinese deity and the patron saint of bean curd, who is out to avenge the death of Chinese miners buried in a cave-in a hundred years earlier. Bruce quickly comes to believe that this is all a show being put on for his benefit, a surprise birthday present from his ineffectual agent. So he goes along with the citizens’ monster-hunting plans… and finds himself in completely over his head when he realizes that Guan-Di is real, and really dangerous. When first faced with the powerful, murderous spirit, Bruce is cowardly and inept, but by the time the third act rolls around, he steps up to redeem himself and become a hero for the first time ever in his real life.

My Name Is Bruce is a really fun movie, a hilarious parody of Campbell’s career and a tribute to the fans that have elevated him to heroic status. Campbell is highly entertaining as this goofball send-up of himself, and the film is packed with references to both his better movies and his lesser ones. To fill out the supporting cast, Campbell turned to several familiar faces he had worked with before, including Danny Hicks, Tim Quill, Ellen Sandweiss, and Ted Raimi in three different roles. Campbell was so committed to bringing this story to life that, as documented in the DVD special features, he even went so far as to build downtown Gold Lick as a backlot on his own property in Oregon.

BURN NOTICE (2007 – 2013)

Created by Matt Nix, this USA Network spy drama series got the sort of run The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. should have gotten a decade earlier. After being “burned” and cut loose by the CIA in the middle of an operation, undercover agent Michael Western (Jeffrey Donovan) returns to his hometown of Miami and teams with his mother Madeline (Sharon Gless), former IRA fighter ex-girlfriend Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), and his friend Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell), a Navy SEAL-turned-FBI informant, to land gigs as a private investigator while also digging into the mystery of why he was burned in the first place. This goes on for a total of seven seasons and 111 episodes, as the P.I. side job is a major distraction.

Michael Westen is the star of this show, Sam Axe is just a supporting character – but he’s there every step of the way, being entertaining in that way only Bruce Campbell can be. As one fan on reddit said, Burn Notice is “the most Bruce Campbell we are ever going to get. Seven magnificent seasons where he is in every damn episode, killing it.” Not even Ash vs. Evil Dead could come close to giving us as much Bruce as this show did. And, of course, Sam Axe proved to be so popular with viewers that he even got his own spin-off prequel movie, Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe, which was directed by Donovan and served as a lead-in to the fifth season in 2011.

HYSTERIA! (2024)

The Peacock series Hysteria! only lasted for one, eight-episode season, but it was a wild ride that had me hooked from beginning to end. I binge-watched this one as quickly as I could, enjoying spending time with the characters and eager to see how the mysteries were going to be resolved. A coming-of-age thriller, the show is set in the 1980s and follows a high school heavy metal band of outcasts that capitalize on the Satanic panic that grips their town when a local kid turns up dead and appears to have been the victim of cult activity. By pretending to be Satanists, these kids are finally able to start building up a fan base – but, of course, this decision makes them the target of suspicion. Because not only was someone killed, and not only have there been cases of abduction and pentagram graffiti vandalism, but there also seems to be something supernatural at work in their small Michigan hometown.

Among the adults drawn into the chaos is the town’s police chief, played by Bruce Campbell. He’s a nice, rational guy, but as the show goes on he starts to have more and more bizarre experiences that cause him to question whether or not he really should be so nice. While the story focuses heavily on the teenagers, Campbell is a reliably charismatic presence whenever he’s on screen. At times, Hysteria! teases the idea that his character might be about to deal with some Evil Dead-style situations, but it never goes quite that far.

And More

Bruce Campbell has more than 170 acting credits to his name, so this is just a small sample of what you can find when you look beyond the Evil Dead projects and dig deeper into his résumé. There is a lot more out there, like cameo appearances in Sam Raimi superhero movies (the Spider-Man trilogy, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), Hallmark movies (One December Night, My Southern Family Christmas), an episode of The X-Files, the Fangoria production Mindwarp, alien movies (Alien Apocalypse, Terminal Invasion), his oddball passion project Man with the Screaming Brain… the list goes on, and one thing is always true: no matter what he’s in, Bruce Campbell always shines brightly.

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