Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports a rating of 79% based on 107 reviews, and an average of 6.8/10. The site's consensus was a tongue-in-cheek statement, "The best movie to star both the King and JFK." Metacritic gives it a weighted average rating of 57/100 based on 28 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film three out of four stars saying, "This absurdly clever caper is elevated by Bruce Campbell's pensive Elvis into a moving meditation on the diminutions of age and the vagaries of fame." Todd McCarthy of Variety gave a negative review stating, "[The] introduction of the mummy plot basically derails the film at about the 45-minute point, and the silly climax...is so rote and generic that it could have come out of any ordinary horror film.", although McCarthy does admit, "Campbell's Elvis stands as one of the very best screen interpretations of the King seen thus far, even if he's arguably not even playing the real thing." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three out of four stars and highlighted the film's "delightful wackiness" and stating, "It has the damnedest ingratiating way of making us sit there and grin at its harebrained audacity, laugh at its outhouse humor, and be somewhat moved (not deeply, but somewhat) at the poignancy of these two old men and their situation." Proposed sequel Initially Coscarelli never intended to create a sequel to Bubba Ho-Tep, as the end credits announcement of a second film entitled Bubba Nosferatu: Curse of the She-Vampires was meant to be seen as a joke. He eventually changed his mind about this after seeing the positive reception for the first film and after several people inquired about when the sequel would be released. The sequel would center around the production of a 'lost' Elvis movie from the 1950s or 1960s, and would bring in Paul Giamatti as Colonel Tom Parker. In 2007 Bruce Campbell reported that he was no longer involved in the sequel, as he and Coscarelli had "a few points [developing the screenplay] that we couldn't reconcile" and that he parted ways with the project as a way of keeping his friendship with the director. The project was briefly reported as "dead" by Joe Lansdale in February 2008, but later that same year Giamatti asserted that the film was still alive and that Ron Perlman was interested