There’s always room in my heart for another creepy killer kid flick but LEE CRONIN'S THE MUMMY had me scratching my head so much you’d think a scarab crawled under my hat. There are some rich, intriguing elements dealing with the dread, repulsion and guilt that accompany the caretaking of a sick loved one yet much of it unravels when faced with even the slightest scrutiny and baffling character behavior reigns. For the most part, I have no idea why this movie insists on presenting itself as a mummy movie when mummies seem to be the furthest thing on its mind. Sure, there’s some Egyptian curses involved and a sarcophagus nearly lands on someone’s head but they mostly come off as decorative quota fillers. Spiritually, this movie has much more in common with Stephen King's PET SEMATARY and its too bad they didn’t just go with another title (THE RETURNED, THE CURSED, THE TAKEN etc.) to avoid expectations.
Cronin’s movie is really about a grieving family who lose their child to a kidnapper, get her back eight years later and then find out maybe they’d all be better off if she had stayed lost (much like his earlier work A HOLE IN THE GROUND (2019)). The child in question evokes much of the same type of discomfort as PET SEMATARY’s kindertrauma legend “Zelda” in that she’s creepy as hell and inspires extreme emotions ranging from absolute revulsion to cautious compassion and then back to pure nausea again. There’s a lot of body horror involved and like David Cronenberg’s THE FLY (’86), it raises the question of how long you can keep loving someone that is changing into something else. The atmosphere of sickness and death is palpable but thankfully Cronin injects enough morbid black humor to keep things from becoming too dire. It’s a rough ride though, especially for anyone who has had to deal with an ailing loved one before.
MIDSOMMAR’s Jack Reynor does an excellent job portraying the father but at the end of the day his biggest obstacle is the script rather than his seemingly possessed child. Every possible bad decision seems to be made by the characters and its almost like they’re all suffering from collective amnesia. I don’t even understand how the child Katie (Natalie Grace) is even allowed out of the hospital looking and acting like she does. I know the state of health care in America is dismal but Katie surely required a bit more healing before discharge. The doctors don’t even bother to clip her twisted toenails which leads to a very effective and yet very illogical scene. All I can do is recommend that you chalk up the slew of inconsistencies as “nightmare logic” and try not to think about how so little of the film makes sense or why nobody behaves in a way that resembles reality as we know it.
Maybe I was just lucky enough to see LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY with a game, lively audience but I rather enjoyed it even while marveling at the quantity of incongruities it shovels. Flaws aside, It’s got more than a few memorably gruesome set pieces, the mood is genuinely unnerving and the performances are above standard. I really dig Cronin’s style and wicked morbidness but someone might suggest to him there’s no shame in dialing up a script doctor. If you enjoyed EVIL DEAD RISE (2023) this is not much of a drop off and could have been something really special if they skipped the unnecessary globetrotting and kept the mummy angle under wraps.
Yeah, this one looks like a definite pass for me. Even from the title, it seems a disjointed mess. I think I got my rather harsh aversion to misnamed films from a very young age when we begged our dad to go see Sorcerer. It turned out to be a boring movie about trying to drive dynamite through the jungle instead of an exciting tale of magic, knights and dragons. I mean seriously, even though I was a little kid, it was so boring that if I had a cyanide capsule in my tooth, I would have bitten on it to end the suffering.
Bdwilcox,
Lol wait, Sorcerer is a good one ! You should try it again an adult. I can totally see it being boring if you are a kid and expecting something else though! It’s funny I just recently saw someone joking about that misleading title on twitter. And the print ads and font totally made it look like a horror/supernatural flick. What were they thinking. It was a remake of WAGES OF FEAR & they should have just kept the title.
My biggest mislead was as a teen in 1982 me and a friend snuck into see SPRING FEVER thinking from the poster it was a raunchy teen comedy and it turned out to be about tennis. I’m still pissed.
The thing that really gets me about LC’s THE MUMMY reminds me of the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake. I LOVE that movie but there’s a scene where they bring an obviously infected woman into the fold (on a wheelbarrow no less) and its after they fully understand what is going on and the woman looks absolutely fully infected and it makes no sense and drives me crazy. In the Mummy they do the same thing, the doctor is like “she just needs some love and rest” and meanwhile she looks like an absolute bog corpse monster.
LOL at Spring Fever. A couple of horny teenagers sneaking in to see a raunchy teen comedy only to be subjected to a melodramatic tennis movie. Sounds like Dante's 10th level of hell to me. On IMDB, it says:
So, totally see why you were mislead. That movie poster looks it came straight from National Lampoon's archive.
As for the movies where they stretched the suspension bridge of disbelief until it crumbled like Galloping Gertie, I would be curious to hear about movie scenes that brought other readers to the point where the spell was broken and they exclaimed, "Oh, come on, that's ridiculous!" I have a few of them, usually centered around scenes where people are chased by monsters, murders, maniacs and madmen, escape by the skin of their teeth, then say, "I need to go back" to retrieve some trinket they dropped because it has sentimental value. "Oh, come on, that's ridiculous!" I refer to that trope as Absurdus ex Machina.
Bdwilcox, the one that drives me nuts to this day is Michael Wincott’s absolutely ridiculous death scene in Alien Resurrection. Not only is he the most charismatic character in the movie and much of the “life” leaves it once he’s gone, but his death is totally nonsensical and out-of-character. He and his team of pirates KNOW that aliens are loose on the ship, and they’ve NEARLY made it back to their shuttle when he decides to investigate a mysterious noise down a dark corridor. Keep in mind that this guy is a mercenary pirate and survivor; NO WAY is he going back to look for possible survivors when he’s nearly made it out. Pisses me off just thinking about it!
I did see The Mummy a couple weeks ago. I didn’t hate it, but have no desire to see it again and agree that the title is misleading. It reminded me of Bob Clark’s Dead of Night/Deathdream, which was obviously also an influence on Pet Sematary.