Review of If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell (LA Weekly Books)
By
The Mischievous Prophet
If you’re a film buff who has the patience for the “fun” projects as well as the “art” movies, you’ve probably got a soft spot in your heart for Bruce Campbell. In fact, I believe that anyone who does not like Bruce Campbell is probably overly pretentious. He isn’t Brando or Olivier; but, as the title of his book might suggest, nobody knows that better than Bruce Campbell himself.
If you have no idea who I’m talking about, you’re really missing out on one of America’s underappreciated treasures. The star of such films as Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness, Crimewave, and The Hudsucker Proxy, Campbell was also heavily involved in the television shows The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., Xena: Warrior Princess, and Hercules: the Legendary Journeys. On the latter two shows, he worked in front of the camera as a guest star and, often, behind the camera, occasionally as director.
If you do know Bruce Campbell, one of If Chins Could Kill’s most startling revelations is that he’s very serious about his craft. Campbell admits to his limitations as an actor, but he has little patience for incompetence, for pretension, for greed, for directors who have no idea how to relate to their actors, for studio suits who see meddling and name-calling as part of the business. If Chins Could Kill is, among other things, a paean to the independent filmmaker.
Of greatest interest to film geeks and/or fans of Campbell himself are the sections detailing the productions of the Evil Dead films. Though he short-changes us a bit on the sequels, his long descriptions of the original Evil Dead shoot are hilarious and enlightening. He describes his life-long friendship with director Sam Raimi (who, in more recent times, has gone on to A-picture status with films like A Simple Plan, The Gift, and Spider-Man) and the other members of their film-geek posse as they grow from Super-8 nonsensical shoots to actually making a living in the movie business. We find, among other things, that Campbell and Raimi have long engaged in a good-natured game of torture one-upmanship. Check out the passages wherein Campbell tries to sabotage Raimi’s beloved car or where Raimi, for no good reason, chases down Campbell after the actor sprains his ankle and pokes him with a stick.
Parts of the book are admittedly slow; those who aren’t hardcore fans may find the sections on Campbell’s life less interesting than the tales told out of film school. But this is, after all, a memoir, the story of Campbell’s life as an actor, and what kind of story would it be if we knew nothing about him that we didn’t know in the first place?
The book also serves as a warning to the prospective independent director. The depths to which Campbell and company have to fall in order to get their films made are often humiliating, maddening; but one gets the feeling that not one of the crew would have traded those experiences for an easier, but film-free, life. To all the would-be directors out there, you could do worse than to hire Bruce, even as a producer. He’s a funny guy and a decent actor, but he’s a dedicated, dead serious filmmaker who has a lot to offer.
Funny and illuminating throughout, If Chins Could Kill is a must-read for anybody who loves movies. Though the book has its problems—the aforementioned slow sections, the way that Evil Dead elicits a much higher page count than the rest of Bruce’s career—it’s worth your time and effort. As Ash might say, it’s “groovy.”
B (what else?)