Even though I’m a macho manly man who has strong muscles and can run really fast and won’t be scared by little girls, no matter how fucked up they look, I was nervous going into this movie. I am happy to report that I left the theater not scared and did not need to leave the lights on during bedtime because I am a big man with no shortage of testosterone and things don’t scare me.
Where you Been Bella Loca?
Indeed, if you’ve been paying attention, I haven’t been watching very many movies in the past few months, and as a result, I haven’t been publishing reviews here either. Sure, I have a backlog of reviews I haven’t published, but even that takes work, y’know? Editing, proofreading, revisiting, finding the poster, making memes, doing the little clicky click to publish and schedule? It takes work. Hard to do that if you’re
D E P R E S S E D
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D E P R E S S E D
But not me. I was not depressed. I’m a big macho alpha bro man who never feels sad or scared. So of course, now that I’m back in the saddle, I thought that I should definitely watch a scary movie, in a nearly empty movie theater, and then go back to my new, echoey apartment in a town where I don’t know anyone. Alone. Just me and my muscles and beard.
But Mummy, I’m Scared!
And truth be told, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy was disconcerting and disturbing and frightening- at least at first. The character design of the mummified girl, the sound design, and the cinematography comes together well to establish the creepy, spooky atmosphere. The first, big scary sequence where the characters run around in their haunted house crawl space was scary.
Then, as the film goes on, Cronin is forced to reveal more and more of the plot and the horror and, as with the Insidious films, the climax unravels into a loud, screeching, CGI-addled poor excuse for ‘scary’. I may be wrong, but it felt that even revealing the girl’s grotesque face felt like a mistake, as her full, proper reveal occurs during a gag.
Yes. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a gory, atmospheric, body horror contains humor. Dark humor, yes, but humor. It’s good. It’s funny. It’s not frequent, and usually, it’s not too intrusive. But in the case of the reveal of the mummy, it was a little odd.
Add to that a generous, goosebump-inducing amount of gore. Peeling skin, pulled teeth, people being eaten alive, eyeballs in grass,and gallons of blood push this film from ‘missed potential’ to ‘quality horror’. It’s not Terrifier-levels of grotesque, but people have aptly compared it to Evil Dead Rise. Click the link for a wikipedia article that sheds more light on that comparison.
The climax, as mentioned, devolves to a loud, loud mess of CGI and screeching and yelling and people shaking off fatal injuries and the big bad monster choosing to crawl around instead of just using its magic powers that allowed it to terrorize people for thousands of years to kill everyone immediately. Nope. The power of family saves the day.
And if that’s not annoying enough, we get even more ‘ending’, which… Was it necessary? Were the final two scenes necessary? Did we need to wrap everything up in a neat bow? Did you need a fakeout of killing a lady in the middle of the movie only to reveal she survived and is now getting her comeuppance? Lordy lord. No restraint. That’s all I can say.
I’d be doing this film a disservice if I don’t mention the B-plot of an Egyptian missing persons cop investigating the cult and the mystical origins of the monster. It was good.
A Chronological List of Illogical Things
I’d also be doing you a disservice if I don’t mention just how stupid this movie can be. A short list of stupid shit in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy:
- Random boy bicycling in a creepy nectarine orchard
- An Egyptologist opening a sarcophagus without any sanitary or scientific methodology
- Transporting an invalid girl across the world, but not providing any medical support afterwards
- Doctors prescribing family time
- Dragging a wheelchair up the stairs by banging it against every step instead of…
- A crawl space that’s 3 feet wide and 6 feet tall that encircles and spans the entire house
- Opening the gate to your home, discovering a pack of coyotes barking at you, and then not immediately closing the gate
- Not investigating why a formerly sweet child is now hurling vulgar insults at everyone she meets
- Using a first aid kit gauze kit to wrap up 15 inches of skin ripped off a shin
- Not investigating why an old lady hurled herself through the window
- Dismissing burn marks branching out of the room of the haunted girl
- Not calling for help. Ever.
So. Watch it? Sure. It’s not mediocre. The gore is fun. Is it memorable? Kind of! How often do we get Egyptian myth being the basis of horror? Is it good? Nah.
YMMV
I watched Lee Cronin’s The Mummy in theaters, and it should be streaming somewhere soon.
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