Released: 16th April
Seen: 7th August
In 2023, Evil Dead Rise was released and became a smash hit. It absolutely dominated the box office with $147 million, got rave reviews from the critics and has possibly the most badass title card reveal that audiences have seen for a very long time. It was the kind of film where the person who made it would be undoubtedly heralded as a potential horror legend and basically guaranteed that they’d be able to make any film they would ever want to make in this specific genre. Therefore, it really shouldn’t be a shock that the next film by writer/director Lee Cronin would not only be one where he’s not held back by studio notes but one where he’s so clearly in charge that they have to put his name in the title… Now, if only Lee Cronin’s The Mummy were actually about The Mummy.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy follows the Cannon family, father Charlie (Jack Reynor), mother Larisa (Laia Costa), son Sebastian (Shylo Molina) and little baby Katie (Natalie Grace). One day while playing in the yard, Katie ends up being kidnapped by a strange woman known only as The Magician (Hayat Kamille) and goes missing for 8 years. She eventually is found when a cargo plane crashes – Katie was on that plane inside a sarcophagus wrapped in bandages and severely malnourished, in a clear state of catatonic trauma while covered in horrifying skin rashes… So naturally, the Cannons take her home to their small house that isn’t really prepared to handle such obvious medical issues. In the 8 years since Katie’s kidnapping, the Cannon family has a new daughter, Maud (Billie Roy), and are somehow mostly just fine otherwise… and then Katie starts doing insanely weird shit, her body is clearly deteriorating in gruesome ways and it all culminates in so much death and destruction in ways that push the boundaries of good taste.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is not a Mummy film, let’s get that straight. Sure, it’s called The Mummy (Techically Lee Cronin’s The Mummy but that’s a long thing to type so I will just shorten it to The Mummy for the bulk of this review), there’s a person wrapped in bandages (for like 3 minutes) and it’s in Egypt but this isn’t a movie about a Mummy. This is Lee Cronin using leftover ideas from his Evil Dead film, combining them with some obvious nods to The Exorcist and lightly applying little touches of the public domain concept of The Mummy to justify the title. Nothing about this really relates to the Mummy other than maybe the first scene after Katie is found and even that’s just to explain why she’s in a big box. This isn’t about some ancient Egyptian pharaoh going around killing people who dig them up, it’s a little girl being possessed and killing people around her until the possession is removed… What’s kind of wild is that this is so much better than the last Exorcist movie we got and about on par with a lower-end Evil Dead movie – so it still works, it just really doesn’t fit with the mythology that the title claims.
Even though the film claims to be about The Mummy, its Evil Dead influences are obvious from the extreme body horror, to the way the possessed creature talks and jokes about how much fun it is to be dead, to just the way the film is shot. There are so many shots that feel like they were lifted straight from the Evil Dead franchise that you could easily put this one alongside them and it’d fit. There’s a sense of pure meanness throughout The Mummy, Katie may be possessed but whatever’s possessing her absolutely hates everyone she’s stuck with and you can feel the enjoyment this character gets out of tormenting everyone. Every time that character is left alone with someone you just can’t help but hold your breath, just waiting to see what the hell is going to be done to whatever poor soul is stuck in the room with this demented monster kid who totally isn’t just a deadite with a different name, we swear.
It also helps that The Mummy does not shy away from anything, it lingers on every disgusting bit of gore it can create and makes you sit with it. You can feel the tension building up each time they’re ready for some new messed-up body horror and when they finally show off whatever crazy effect they’ve come up with, it’s truly unnerving in all the best ways. There’s no real holding back based on what’s tasteful, a 7-year-old will just call someone a rat-faced cunt before having their toes licked by a demon because it’s obscenely messed up and that’s kind of what The Mummy revels in. It’s playing to the same audience who enjoyed the messed-up horror of things like the Evil Dead franchise and is having a ton of fun in that wickedness. It’s all very well put together, you can’t help but feel uncomfortable and a little sick just seeing some of these images, which is clearly the intention and it nails that.
What it doesn’t nail is the movie’s overall pacing. While there are some scenes where the buildup really works well, and there’s a lot of tension, The Mummy itself is a bit bloated and can’t quite sustain the momentum it’s built up. There are at least three or four moments where things hit such a high that it should logically move to the climax, but it doesn’t, possibly because the effects team had one more cool idea they wanted to try and so they just keep adding to the runtime. The impact of some of these moments stops working when we keep having everyone split up so they can all calm down and then have another big climactic scene. By the 90-minute mark, you’re expecting this film to wind down and it doesn’t because there’s still over a half hour of pointless stuff to go. It drags everything out and instead of maybe replacing it with more chaotic imagery that could at least make the extra runtime more enjoyable it chooses to just keep cutting back to the parents going “We’ll try again a little later” as though we’re just waiting for Katie to stop having a temper tantrum when, in reality, half the skin from her leg has been pulled off and her sister just called the teacher a rat-faced cunt, we should probably do something about that instead of just sitting around for 10 minutes till everyone’s had a breather.
That bad pacing issue really lets you just kind of linger with the reality that this Mummy movie is just not a mummy movie. It borrows some of the imagery, the general idea of what a Mummy can be but it’s not about a Mummy and it feels like they know it. There’s barely any attempt to really sell us that this is about a Mummy; it knows we can see what it’s really trying to be and doesn’t even try to cover it up. Its lack of focus makes it harder to really engage with at times, and then it throws up some fucked up body-horror imagery and we’re back on. When the film actually pushes itself to really try it can make for a lot of fun moments but boy, when it slows down you can feel that in your bones.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy might not be an actual Mummy movie but, at its best, it’s a genuinely unsettling body horror that tests the boundaries of what you can get away with in a relatively mainstream horror film. It’s the kind of film that really makes you squirm and has a lot of fun with messing with you, you can really tell a lot about the director’s taste in horror just from this film alone and I would love it if he could make a lot more films like this one because it is fun… just maybe have someone to pull on the reigns to get him to focus a little more and you could have another Evil Dead Rise-level horror film, easily.
Movie Meister Reviews 