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I don't think anyone is ever going to mistake My Name is Bruce for a good film, but that's rather beside the point. Bruce Campbell, the film's director and star (with the help of screenwriter Mark Verheiden), has made a film celebrating bad films. More than that, he has made an affectionate ode to fans of schlocky, straight-to-video sci-fi and horror genre films. And, to a very large extent, he has made a love letter to his own fans.

Campbell has carved out a recognizable niche as the square-jawed star of films with titles like Maniac Cop and Assault on Dome Four, which would put him in the venerable company of any number of z-grade Hollywood movie actors slogging it out in the trenches of zero-budget filmmaking, but for two things. First of all, Campbell had the great good fortune to be childhood friends with director Sam Raimi, and so wound up being the star of Raimi's Evil Dead series. Raimi is an undeniably talented filmmaker (he helmed the Spider Man movies, as well as having directed a remarkable crime film called A Simple Plan), and the Evil Dead movies have found a dedicated cult following, thanks, in part, to Raimi's decision to make each entry in the series progressively sillier.

And that brings us to the next detail that separates Campbell from, say, Joe Estevez, who makes dozens of low-budget genre films per year and nonetheless is best known as Martin Sheen's brother. Campbell has developed a very distinct film persona -- he swaggers and talks in action movie star cliches, but he doesn't so much perform onscreen heroics as extended pratfalls. Cambell plays himself in My Name is Bruce, or, at least, a cartoonish version of Bruce Campbell borrowing more from his onscreen persona than his actual life. For instance, in this film, he has an ex-wife named Cheryl; in the real world he is married to someone named Ida. Further, his ex-wife in this film is played by Ellen Sandweiss, whose actual relationship with Bruce Campbell is as his costar in the original Evil Dead movie.

The Bruce Campbell in My Name is Bruce is an actor who has suffered a much less dignified career than the actual Bruce Campbell, reduced to endless sequels in an abominable franchise called Cave Alien, and otherwise spending his time pouring liquor down his throat in his cluttered mobile home and threatening his agent in strip clubs. It isn't a very likable Bruce Campbell that the film gives us. He abuses his fans, leers as his female costars ("It's good to be working with professionals," he tells one; "I wouldn't know," she shoots back), and snaps at his personal assistant. The real Bruce Campbell plays this fictionalized version for less for warts and all than for warts and warts. Rarely has an actor ever allowed themselves to be represented in as undignified and callow a fashion as Campbell does here.

The fictional Campbell soon finds himself locked in the trunk of a 1973 Delta 88 Oldsmobile, the very car that Sam Raimi owned and has given cameo appearances in almost every one of his films. Campbell has been kidnapped by one of his fans, an elfen goth named Jeff, played by Taylor Sharp. Jeff is taking Campbell to a small former mining town in Oregon called Gold Lick, where the boy has accidentally released an ancient Chinese demon named Guan-Di, who has enormous, glowing eyes and a penchant for lopping people's heads off. In one of the few scenes of really biting satire, the townsfolk explain why a Chinese demon is in the Pacific Northwest: They show a page from an old newspaper, and the banner headline reads "Foal Gives Birth to Calf with Two Heads!" Beneath that, in smaller size type, a headline reads "Spelling Bee Today!" Beneath that, tucked into the corner of the page, in tiny type, is a story about 800 Chinese railroad workers being trapped in a mine cave in. Guan-Di was their protector, and was buried with them, a fact that caused scant attention when it happened, but is now costing the lives of the people of Gold Lick.

With the z-movie premise suitably explained, the townspeople look to Bruce Campbell to save them, apparently having mistaken his slapstick machismo onscreen for real monster-killing talents off. And Campbell gamely plays along for a while, laboring under the misapprehension that everybody in Gold Lick is an actor, hired to play out an elaborate role-playing game for his birthday. It's a rather silly premise, yes, and owes a great deal to Three Amigos, but, then, the whole films is intended as a sort of extended lampoon of crappy horror films, and improbable premises just come with the territory. Campbell uses the story as an excuse for some of his typically inspired slapdash comedy -- when he discovers the monster is real, he simply takes off running, stealing bicycles from children and cars from old women, and eventually leaping aboard a truck to take him out of town, mocking the people of Gold Lick as the truck pulls out away from the town's saloon, only to have it circle back to the saloon for a better parking spot.

If the story is often weak and the comedy tepid, Campbell deserves credit for one thing: He has created a film in which the obsessed fan is the hero, which is quite different from previous films of this sort. Look at Misery as an earlier example, in which a romance writer's obese and infantile reader ties him to a bed and cripples him in order to bend him to her will. In My Name is Bruce, his biggest fan has an affection for him that the fictional Campbell hasn't earned, and when the actor turns out to be a coward, the boy suits up in his studded leather wrist bands and Hot Topics chains and sets out after the monster himself. He's a sweet kid with no business battling the supernatural, but if a Hollywood hero won't do it for him, he'll do it for himself.

Movie stars sometimes give lip service to their fans, mouthing platitudes about how they wouldn't have much of a career if it wasn't for their audience. But Campbell has created a version of himself that really doesn't have much of a career, and really isn't much of a man, and is shown up at every turn by a pale-skinned weakling of a boy. In My Name is Bruce, the fans are the real stars.