Though Fox is banking on Bruce Campbell as its next big star, he's not a familiar face to most of the television viewing audience.
Campbell plays the title character in the action/adventure/West-ern "The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.," which debuts tonight at 7 p.m. on Ch. 13.There will, however, be a portion of the audience to whom Campbell's face is familiar - those who frequent low-budget horror movies.
That's right. The actor has starred in such classics as "The Evil Dead," "The Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn," "Army of Darkness," "Maniac Cop" and "Mindwarp."
In addition, he's produced "The Evil Dead II," "Army of Darkness" and movies like "Crimewave" and "Lunatics."
Not exactly the resume you'd expect for the star of a show aimed at kids and young adults.
"It's the darndest thing," Campbell said of his horror career. In high school, he and his friends made about 35 movies on Super-8.
"They were all Three Stooges, slapstick movies. And then we thought, `Well, high school's done and we need a job now. . . . We need to figure out what we're going to do,' " he said. "So we thought, `Well, let's make a movie.'
"We were terrified that we were going to lose our investors' money, so we thought, `Well, let's make a low-budget horror film. You don't need to have name actors. You don't need fancy clothes or cars. You can take five kids and put them in a cabin in the middle of nowhere.' "
After that, Campbell had a difficult time doing anything but low-budget horror stories - and not because that's what he wanted to be doing.
"Unfortunately, the way this industry works, if that's what your first job is, they go, `Well, let's get the guy who does horror movies,' " he said.
And he's the first to admit that some of the stuff he's done in those films has been pretty strange - like the scene in "Evil Dead 2" in which he fought with his own hand.
"Oh, it was a barrel of laughs," Campbell said. "For those of you who've not seen it, my hand gets possessed in this movie and I wind up smashing my head on counters and breaking plates and bottles over my head with my own hand.
"And it's not something you can really rehearse or stage, so we pretty much said, `All right, you start here. You break a couple of plates over your head here. You flip yourself here. You smash your head on the counter here. And, eventually, you've got to get over there by the end of the take.'
"It's not something you can really go through by the numbers. You just sort of have to wing it."
Just talking to television critics at the recent summer press tour was an entirely new experience for Campbell.
"Usually, I go to horror conventions and they say, `What was it like to have 50 gallons of blood dropped on your head?' " he said.
Not only is Campbell not apologetic about his life as a hor-ror-meis-ter, but he's grateful for the training it gave him.
"Actually, it has been tremendous training for what I'm doing now," he said. "I come from the independent world of feature films where they can't always afford stunt men . . . so I was forced to learn to do a lot of my own stuff, which hopefully made me a little more multifaceted. So when I went to audition for (`Brisco County'), I pulled the old standard routine.
"When you audition with dialogue, it's easy. You show up and you say a line, and then one part of the audition was `And they fight.' There's a bunch of executives in the room. You're not going to grab some guy. . . . I didn't know what else to do and so I . . . " - and then he flipped himself in front of the press conference, much to the surprise of those in attendance.
"The problem is that after I did it at the first audition, they went, `You're going to do that flip thing for the next audition, right?' " Campbell said. "so the problem is that I had to audition six times to get the role, so by the time we did the first episode I let the stunt men do a bunch of stuff."
But he is excited about the chance to star in a show that's been called a '90s version of "The Wild, Wild West."
"I grew up with `The Wild, Wild West.' It was the coolest show of its day," Campbell said. And I think all of us here would hope that `The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.' is the new cool show . . . so that 20 years from now, those kids can say, `When I was a kid, that was the coolest show around.' "