It seems a little pretentious that the director of “The Mummy” put his name on the poster and in the opening credits above the title of the new film about the classic monster from the era of Dracula, Frankenstein, the Werewolf and the Invisible Man. So “The Mummy: The Lee Cronin Movie” or “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy”.
What Lee Cronin thinks that it is John Carpenter? Obviously, because Carpenter did it for his third film “Halloween” and after that his name and surname were not only on “Memoirs of the Invisible Man”. “The Mummy” is also Cronin’s third film, following the debut of “The Hole In The Ground” in 2019 and his spin on the “Evil Dead” franchise called “The Evil Dead: Awakening.”
They are good horror genre films, but they do not (yet) suggest a master of horror and a genius of the caliber of Carpenter, moreover “The Mummy” dangerously refutes that. Nevertheless, Cronin asserts himself as an auteur, like Carpenter, given that he directs and writes screenplays, and his films are connected by parenthood as a central thematic thread. But, regardless of that, he is not yet such a well-known name in the world of (horror) films that he would be advertised as such.
Although it is possible that his name and surname have been included in the title so that viewers do not think that the announced continuation of “The Mummy” with Brendan Fraser already recorded, i.e. that the new film differs from that action-adventure franchise that moved away from the original horror Boris Karloff as well as the infamous blockbuster s Tom Cruiseit would be better if it was titled, for example, “Horror Of The Mummy” (following “Horror Of Dracula”). And the best – “The Mummy Of The Evil Dead”.
“The Mummy” is so similar to “Evil Dead Rise”, especially in the last third, that it looks as if Cronin made an Egyptian sequel to his previous and much better film “Evil Dead Rise”, so it’s a miracle that the chainsaw never cuts. As much as “The Mummy” detached itself from Fraser’s films, it stuck to “Evil Death”. It’s cute that Cronin paid tribute to the legendary scene from the original “Evil Dead” by emerging from the funeral casket, but the director doesn’t stop there.
The aesthetics and brutality of “The Mummy” are copied literally from Cronin’s predecessor. Okay, that can pass under “authorship”, but it’s not good that “The Mummy” is more “Evil Dead” than “The Mummy”. And not only that, “The Mummy” turns out to be another horror movie about possessions with twists and “evildoers” from “Devil Chaser”, at the same time a horror movie with creepy kids who destroy families from the inside (“Prediction”, “Orphan”…).
Possession related to ancient Egyptian demonology and the demon Nasmaranian, the “destroyer of the family”, afflicted the unfortunate Katie (played by the younger Emily Mitchelland in the teenage years Natalie Grace), the daughter of a TV journalist-correspondent from Cairo and a nurse (Jack Reynor and Laia Costa like Charlie and Larissa).
After the kidnapping eight years ago, Katie is found in a basalt sarcophagus, which is several thousand years old, but it soon becomes clear that the child is not only in the so-called in a “trapped state”, although her family refuses to believe it for too long, which can irritate even more their behavior (Charlie does not tell his wife and the detective from Cairo in the interpretation May Calamawy his key discoveries about Katie, and the secretary on his cell phone calls him in the critical hour), but also the excessive explanation of the story, which kills the little tension and mystery.
When Charlie and Larissa get the VHS tape of what happened to Katie, they will watch the entire tape all the way through so that nothing is left in clues and on the edge of the viewer’s field of vision. In fact, a lot of things in the film are “exaggerated”, from the use of diopter lenses to the body horror. Diopter frames are more effective when used occasionally (ask Brian De Palma), and Cronin has a dozen of them. It’s nice to see that he has mastered the technique, but “you shouldn’t go to extremes” (“Tight skin”).
It should also be said that Cronin orchestrates well the scenes of “body” horror, often truly uncomfortable, sadistic and grotesque (pay attention to cutting Katie’s nails and skin peeling), but when you see a dozen such sequences in a row, the effect is lost and it becomes repetitive, no matter how “creative” the director knows how to be (scorpion in the throat).
In the scenes of extreme displacement, Cronin also reaches for Raimi’s “splatter” red and black humor (the lipstick scene with secretions). Sam Raimi would probably compliment Cronin on that, but also probably advise him to reduce the experiences a bit. Certainly, the doctor’s warning given to Charlie and Larissa before meeting the found Katie also applies to “The Mummy”: “It is very important that you prepare for what you will see.” ** ⅔
