The Best Bruce Campbell Movie and TV Shows, Ranked

Bruce Campbell is not a typical actor, but more of a brand with an infectious over-the-top personality that has drawn a legion of fans. His style is a parody of heroism, with equal parts confidence and incompetence. His persona is brash as well as kind of obnoxious, but also self-deprecating and ultimately engaging.

Though Campbell did have an interest in acting, his career started by accident, or perhaps fate, when his high school friend Sam Raimi decided to make a horror movie. Ash Williams from The Evil Dead, launched not just an amazing gory franchise, but also one of the most entertaining actors of all time, whose every movie and TV role is a gift to fans.

15 Thankfully, Officer Jack Forrest Is Not The Maniac Cop

Fresh from the success of Evil Dead II, Bruce Campbell landed the role of Officer Jack W. Forrest Jr. in the 1988 slasher, Maniac Cop. Because there are no spoiler alerts for 35-year-old films, it can be pointed out that fans were a little upset with the beginning of the movie when it was made to seem like Campbell’s character was the titular killer police officer, but thankfully that was a ruse.

Officer Jack Forrest is probably Campbell’s most conventional role, which makes it an interesting outlier in his career. He plays it fairly straight, but there are definite wacky undertones. Campbell would reprise the role in the 1990 sequel, Maniac Cop 2, if only for a brief cameo. Matt Cordell, A.K.A. The Maniac Cop has racked up one of the biggest kill counts for a movie killer, and Campbell’s Jack Forrest made the list. However, the movie itself is among the weakest in Campbell’s career, landing at the bottom of the list.

14 William Cole Is The Man With The Screaming Brain

Willian Cole, in the 2005 slapstick sci-fi movie, Man with the Screaming Brain, is another Bruce Campbell role that he plays fairly straight, at least at first. Cole is a wealthy drug company CEO, who is in Bulgaria trying to diversify his company’s investments when a series of morbidly hilarious events leads to him having part of his brain replaced with the gray matter of a local cab driver.

Once Cole’s brain is “screaming,” fans get a proper Campbell-esque zany performance. The film was written and directed by Campbell for the Syfy cable network and is a hidden gem in his filmography. It’s a campy nod to the preposterous science-run-amok movies of the 1950s with a contemporary take, and it has Bruce Campbell in top form, making a thoroughly entertaining piece of filmmaking.

13 Campbell is the Unimpressed Coach Boomer in Sky High

Sky High might not have aged as well as other superhero flicks of the 2000s, but Campbell’s performance as Coach Boomer did. In the film, superheroes are nothing new in modern society. In this context, Will Stronghold, the son of two renowned superheroes, sticks out for not having developed any superpowers yet. He hides this secret from everyone, a task that gets increasingly difficult when he attends Sky High, a floating school for promising superheroes.

Coach Boomer is the one assigned to designate students into groups of heroes or sidekicks. As his nickname Boomer implies, he’s not slightly impressed by the new promising abilities the new generation of superheroes have to offer, but he shows a captivating sense of humor nonetheless. Due to his limited screen time, Campbell is not exactly a recurring scene-stealer in Sky High, but his appearances never fail to bring about some good laughs.

12 Smitten With Smitty In The Hudsucker Proxy

The Hudsucker Proxy is another so-so movie made better by the mere presence of Bruce Campbell in the cast. The 1994 “comedy” directed by the Coen brothers, is completely devoid of laughs and stifled the talents of heavyweights like Paul Newman and Charles Durning, but somehow, Campbell as the hardboiled chain-smoking reporter, Smitty, managed to shine. Truth be told, Campbell stole the spotlight from the A-list ensemble cast.

Campbell got the role without an audition, due to his long relationship with the Coen brothers. Joel Coen was the editor of The Evil Dead, and both brothers co-wrote the 1985 Campbell comedy, Crimewave. Campbell also starred in an investor short for Blood Simple, and Sam Raimi has been involved in many Coen brothers productions, including co-writing The Hudsucker Proxy. Campbell was made for the role of Smitty, but unfortunately, there wasn’t enough interesting stuff around him to make the movie a success.

11 There’s No Escaping The Surgeon General of Beverly Hills In Escape From L.A.

Escape from L.A., released in 1996, is easily one of John Carpenter’s worst movies. The sequel to 1981’s brilliant Escape from New York, was hokey, insulting to the intelligence of the viewer, and monotonous, with the notable exception of Bruce Campbell as the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills. This character is so satisfyingly bonkers, that it makes sitting through the otherwise dreary film, somewhat tolerable.

The Surgeon General is a demented doctor who performs extreme plastic surgery procedures and runs a human chop shop, harvesting younger body parts to beautify his elite clientele. While Campbell is an unambiguous villain, it’s not off-putting because of his tongue-in-cheek (almost literally) performance, and his makeup, which gives him the exaggerated look of a face-lift gone awry.

10 Ash is Dragged to the Middle Ages in Army of Darkness

While The Evil Dead is the scariest entry in the franchise, Army of Darkness is undoubtedly the funniest. It suddenly transports Ash and the audience to England’s Dark Ages, where he must face an army of the undead and gain the loyalty of angry nobles in order to retrieve the Necronomicon and return to his original timeline. A broken 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88, a shotgun, and a chainsaw for an arm are the only weapons at Ash’s disposal, and just about enough to turn him into an army of one.

Army of Darkness delivers a nice blend of dark fantasy, horror, and comedy, but is too much of a departure from Evil Dead‘s well-established tone, making it a divisive entry. In the film, Campbell’s rendition of Ash Williams is closer to Monty Python than Raimi’s unlikely hero, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The actor is free to showcase his natural talent for comedy in a film that has no restrictions on humor, embracing all the nonsense that defines Army of Darkness. However, the movie works better as a standalone story than as the final entry of a horror trilogy, landing at number 10 on the list.

9 His Name Is Bruce Campbell In My Name is Bruce

No actor has been more suited for a role than Bruce Campbell playing a fictionalized version of himself in the 2007 horror comedy, My Name is Bruce. This is Campbell at his most fun, because he satirizes himself, as a caricature of all his previous roles. It would have been cruel and even insulting for another actor to do, like as an SNL skit, but Campbell doesn’t take himself too seriously, and there’s nobody more Bruce than him.

The movie is actually pretty funny with an Evil Dead kind of vibe to it. When an ancient evil spirit is unleashed in the small town of Gold Lick, Oregon, residents kidnap Bruce to fight it, since he is famous for battling malevolent forces in his movies. There is probably some kind of message that actors are not defined by their roles, but that is completely lost as Campbell clearly loved playing an overblown version of himself.

8 Only Brisco County, Jr. Could Have The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.

Bruce Campbell got his first TV role on Knotts Landing in 1987 and has gone on to do hundreds of episodes on the small screen, mostly as a cameo or reoccurring role, but also sometimes as the star. In 1993, he got his first chance to lead a series in the criminally underrated The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr, as a wise-cracking bounty hunter tracking down the ruthless gang that killed his father.

Besides being entertaining, the show was innovative for a network prime-time series, combining elements of weird western, sci-fi, and steam-punk. It was also hilarious, in no small part due to Campbell’s sarcastic, condescending portrayal. While it seems like the role of Brisco County, Jr. was tailor-made for Campbell, it had not been written for him, and he had to audition five times before he got the nod.

7 Autolycus Steals The Scenes In Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess

Autolycus is a thief from Greek mythology who was kind of a trickster with the power to conceal his crimes. When portrayed by Bruce Campbell, Autolycus, is still a bit of a rogue, though much funnier. Campbell played the reoccurring role of the self-proclaimed “King of Thieves” on both Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess as a comic antihero and stealer of scenes.

Campbell brought overconfidence and an inflated ego to the role but also made the character charismatic as only he can do. Campbell so nailed Autolycus, that he became the most popular character on both shows, and it’s weird that producers never gave him his own spin-off. Xena’s actor, Lucy Lawless, and Campbell formed a friendship on the set, and she would end up with a reoccurring role in his series Ash vs Evil Dead as Ruby Knowby.

6 The King Of Rock N’ Roll Battles The King Of The Dead In Bubba Ho-Tep

It seems evident that Bruce Campbell’s characters have borrowed a little bit of Elvis Presley’s groove and in the innovative 2002 comedy horror, Bubba Ho-Tep, he got a chance to portray the King of Rock and Roll. Technically, he played Sebastian Haff, the name of a man who Elvis switched places with to escape the prison of fame, but in the movie, he is the real King, though elderly and dying from an unfortunate form of cancer.

Along with his sidekick, Jack, who insists he is President John F. Kennedy in a black man’s body, Elvis battles an ancient Egyptian mummy who is reaping souls in a retirement home. This may be Campbell’s most accomplished role that pushed his skills beyond anything he has done before or since. Hitting the Elvis persona perfectly, he also brought some dramatic intensity to the part but didn’t abandon his trademark snarky sense of humor.

5 The Evil Dead is a Landmark of Independent Cinema

Sam Raimi did magic with a $375,000 budget and a limited team of filmmakers, accomplishing The Evil Dead and forever changing the horror landscape. The film is one of the pioneers of the cabin-in-the-woods trope, gathering a group of college students in a remote shack and forcing them to fight an unknown source of evil that’s accidentally awakened. Among them is, of course, Ash Williams, the only character among the bunch who might be sane enough to fight the demons that haunt the surrounding woods.

The Evil Dead‘s greatest appeal is the hopeless horror atmosphere that permeates the narrative once chaos breaks in. It’s a low-budget movie that works around its limitations with a clever creative vision, from the iconic POV shots in the forest to the impressive make-up efforts to make the demons look as scary now as they were 40 years ago. Although The Evil Dead lacks the franchise’s signature dark humor, the unnerving horror sequences do pay off and Ash’s unflinching determination in the face of the unknown makes him a great horror hero, earning the number 5 spot on the list.

4 Campbell Plays the Ultimate Guy Who Knows A Guy in Burn Notice

Burn Notice is a hit spy TV show of the late 2000s that follows Jeffrey Donovan as Michael Westen, a spy whose connections with the underworld are suddenly terminated. Finding himself short of cash, with no trustworthy contacts, and pretty much without a real identity, Westen becomes an unlicensed private investigator for the people of Miami while investigating his own blacklist situation.

Campbell steps in as Sam Axe, Westen’s most faithful buddy and the guy to rely on when it comes to connections. Sam is pretty much a caricature of what a retired spy should look like: a heavy-drinker, laid-back womanizer with very little to care about, although he keeps his share of important connections in case something suspicious comes up. Despite his nonchalant personality, Sam is a sharp-witted character who guides Westen when he lacks focus or moral clarity. He’s certainly one of the reasons Burn Notice holds up as one of the best mystery procedurals of the past years.

3 Ash Sets Out to Save the World in Ash vs Evil Dead

Though he officially retired the character following the cancelation of the Ash vs Evil Dead series, Bruce Campbell will forever be linked to Ash Williams. Before Ash vs Evil Dead, all the problems the titular hero had to face — no matter how dangerous and terrifying they were — were pretty isolated. That’s the reason Ash was never deemed an actual hero and found himself leading a peaceful, uneventful life for over 30 years until he decided to use the Necronomicon to impress a woman and accidentally unleash an evil curse on the world. That proves that Ash’s biggest enemy still is, in fact, his own recklessness, but this time, he finally has the chance to make a name for himself.

The version of Ash fans get to see in Ash vs Evil Dead is a true leader and mankind’s last hope. The TV show gathers the best elements of the Evil Dead franchise in a darkly hilarious, ultra-violent, and over-the-top journey to prevent a Deadite plague from spreading around the globe. The series is both a homage and a fresh take on Ash’s character and the role he plays in the horror genre as a whole. The larger-than-life persona of Ash Williams spilled over to TV, comics, and video games, making him a franchise unto himself. While Campbell has mothballed Ash, there is hope that he has one more round against the Deadites left in him.

2 The Bruce Campbell Cinematic Universe Of Cameos

Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi got their start together and have collaborated on dozens of projects over the years. Even when Raimi directs something with no major role for Campbell, he likes to give his friend a cameo, like he did with the aggro ring announcer in Spider-Man, who inadvertently dubs the web-slinger “The Amazing Spider-Man. The movie was such a success that Raimi must have felt Campbell was a good luck charm so he got the role of the passive-aggressive theater usher in Spider-Man 2.

Completing the trilogy, Campbell had a hilarious cameo as the pseudo-French Maître d’ in Spider-Man 3. When Raimi was tapped to direct Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the Campbell cameo made the leap to the MCU, with his hysterical portrayal of the “Pizza Poppa” guy. The character then popped up in the film’s post-credit scene for some extra hilarity. Clearly, the shared universes of superhero movies need Ash Williams, but at least they’ve gotten a little dose of Bruce Campbell to lighten things up.

1 The Ash Williams Introduced in Evil Dead 2 Defined a Generation of Horror

First playing Ash Williams in the 1981 independent horror hit, The Evil Dead, Campbell would further develop the character in Evil Dead II. The sequel, which works like a reimagining of the first movie, improved its predecessor in many aspects, adding welcoming hints of dark comedy, elevating the repulsiveness, and most importantly, turning Ash into the defining horror icon of an era.

The swagger, the inflated sense of self-worth, the slapstick bungling, and, of course, the one-liners, all helped to make Ash a cult hero with rockstar status, as well as establishing Campbell’s career. Campbell’s mastery of the Ash character in Evil Dead II, in turn, made The Evil Dead into an enduring franchise. The pure genius of Campbell’s portrayal of Ash is that he took a pompous jackass train wreck of human beings and made him into a thoroughly likable character, adored by fans the world over. It’s in Evil Dead II that fans finally get to hear the iconic “Groovy” one-liner, a wisecrack that still echoes in the mind of every aspiring horror filmmaker.