My Name Is Bruce

If the film disappoints then at least the DVD doesn’t - this two-disc set is packed with a lot of extras. The commentary by Bruce Campbell and producer Mike Richardson goes into a fair amount of detail about the background and production, while their long-time friendship ensures a light-hearted tone. Among the key revelations are that each of the Three Stooges is referenced in the film, that Bruce’s land is where they shot a lot of the footage, and that with the exception of Ellen Sandweiss, all the other females from Evil Dead turned down the opportunity to be in My Name Is Bruce

The highlight of disc two is an hour-long making of documentary Heart Of Dorkness, an extensive documentary about pre-production and production of My Name Is Bruce. Despite a slightly strained riffing on the famous Apocalypse Now documentary, Heart Of Dorkness is a good production diary, effective at covering the difficulties in the production, such as generator troubles, vehicle problems, bees, and poison oak. The footage also captures the building of the backlot for the town of Gold Lick on Bruce’s property and nicely illustrates the close ties Bruce has to a lot of the people involved in the production, almost all of whom contribute to this documentary, too.

The featurettes are plentiful but slight, while also managing to be fun but pointless. Bruce On… is a lightly amusing collection of missives from Bruce on topics ranging from bear and cougar attacks, how many My Name Is Bruce can be made for $200,000,000 (answer – 133 and a bit, apparently), and Bruce ‘flipping the bird’ to the camera. Awkward Moments With “Kif” are just that, an odd couple clips featuring AP Craig “Kif” Sanbourn killing conversation. “Kif” pops up again in “Kif’s” Korner, showing the fake DVD and poster art for the fictional films featuring Bruce Campbell, the highlight being mock-up art to The Stoogitive - guess what film that’s referencing?

The rest of the featurettes are all spoof in nature and are intermittently funny. Love Bites is a fictional tribute to the homosexual redneck couple from the film, while The Hard Truth features fake cast and crew testimonies of the man they call Bruce. Even the film within a film Cavealien 2 gets its own featurettes. The fake trailer is a laugh featuring some goddamn awful CG and terrible acting. Inside The Cave: The Making Of Cavealien 2 goes a little too far into the realms of pointlessness, despite the public access TV style and fine use of wipe-cuts, star-cuts, and every other awful transition available. Rounding off this decent package are a number of galleries (poster art, props art, and a photo gallery) and trailer.