Unfortunately, "Ho-Tep" is a punch line in search of a setup. The writer and director, Don Coscarelli, faithfully working a short story by Joe R. Lansdale, is moored in confines as limiting as the wheelchair the King uses to get around and a budget as starved of cash as Presley's movies were of imagination. There is a grungy high spirit during the first third of this film, but then it dissipates like a mist from an aerosol can.

When "Ho-Tep" requires that extra charge of magic or technique to lift it, the picture stalls out; finally, it is neither scary enough nor funny enough. What fission the film generates comes from its lead performers, including Ossie Davis's mocking, salted gravitas in playing Kennedy. Here he was surgically made black -- and can't go back -- when he was spirited away after a 1963 assassination attempt.

Both of these living legends -- they're alive in this film, anyway -- are right out of a battle-ready episode of "The Golden Girls." Along these lines, the movie is often enlivened by a cranky, wheels-off performance by Bruce Campbell as the King. A self-confessed king himself -- king of the second-tier film circuit, as he admits in his funny, off-kilter autobiography, "If Chins Could Kill" -- Mr. Campbell portrays an elderly Presley at the end of his days, but still intoxicated by his own mythos. Mr. Campbell's performance has a low-voltage surliness, with a hint of honest pathos; it provides a sense of a man trapped in his persona.

"Ho-Tep" tells us that it was not Elvis who died in 1977, but an impersonator, while the real King has been making a living as an Elvis impersonator ever since. He goes by the nom de pop Sebastian Haff. Aged and ailing from various afflictions, Presley rolls around his Texas rest home with a sour grandeur. Mr. Campbell gives the performance a crusty pride; it is the best part he's ever had, and he shows his respect for the material. His rundown, B-picture-star looks add to Presley's fallen grace. He has the exaggerated cleft chin and noble forehead of a movie-idol caricature drawn by Mad magazine's Mort Drucker.

"Ho-Tep," also falls back on the antic, self-conscious jokiness of a Mad magazine movie parody. Despite Mr. Campbell's performance, the film winks at its pop-historical perspective so often that it starts to feel like a twitch.

The creature of the title is called Bubba Ho-Tep because of its big-brimmed Stetson and cowboy boots, and it is not much of a threat. If the rest home had been presented just a little more realistically, the horror of a monster preying on a discarded segment of society would have lent necessary dread to the picture. By the time "Bubba Ho-Tep" winds down, you feel as if someone has opened Pandora's box and found that its menacing contents have gone stale.