After fucking up the Evil Dead franchise with the godawful Evil Dead Rise, Lee Cronin sets his sight on The Mummy. Now, the actual on-screen title is Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, but I’m making it a rule that only people who make good movies get their names in the title. Either that or they just can’t make the same damn movie twice with only slight variations. I mean after this and Rise, it seems Cronin’s sole MO is to take a family that’s already in crisis and put them through hell. The good news is this is better than Evil Dead Rise. Honestly, that wasn’t all that hard to do.
A young girl is kidnapped while her family is working in Cairo. Eight years later, she’s found in a sarcophagus and returned to her parents. The girl has obviously been through a lot, but that’s no excuse for antisocial behavior that includes running around the house like a spider monkey, eating bugs, and throwing your grandma out the window.
Let’s face it. There was no goddamn reason this thing had to be one-hundred-and-thirty-four goddamned minutes. It enjoyed bits and pieces of the film, but honestly if Cronin cut about fifty minutes from this, it would’ve been easier on all of us. The feeling of déjà vu didn’t help either. Most of the time it seemed like he was trying to make another Evil Dead movie, but couldn’t get the rights, so he just traded out Kandarian demons for Egyptian ones. The parts where the girl infects other family members with the evil are also like Evil Dead, and there are other moments that rip off The Exorcist and Patrick.
Man, if you go into The Mummy expecting to see… you know… a mummy, you’re going to be hella disappointed. The little girl isn’t really a mummy, but more of a vessel of evil. While there is a mummy in the movie, it only gets about a minute of screen time.
At least the gore is good. We get a hook through the chin, a stick through the eye, a gnarly toenail cutting scene, an abuela getting eaten by coyotes, a pretty funny funeral scene and a cool bit where a woman’s got to stick her fingers down her throat the hard way. That’s not quite enough to salvage the dreary, sluggish, and unnecessary parts. It still doesn’t take away the fact that this is a bait-and-switch Mummy movie. Heck, I might’ve been more forgiving if it was called Egyptian Dead or something. I mean, to make a movie called The Mummy that barely has a mummy in it feels like some kind of pyramid scheme.
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