'Lee Cronin's The Mummy' Wraps Around Enough Frights
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is like a mixture of The Exorcist and A Weekend at Bernie’s. It’s dark, comedic, obscure, and mostly works. The movie is close to achieving something special, but is held back by laughable characters who make baffling choices. As a popcorn flick, Lee Cronin makes something that’s a lot of fun. As a movie, it desperately needs to hold back on the jump scares. They’re only effective when you use them once in a while. They have to be earned, not used as a crutch. Even the closing title is a jump scare. Unless you’re watching The Shining, a jump scare to a title card is ineffective. Despite a case of the cheap boos, the movie has some marvelous scenes that will haunt you, while you’ll be laughing the next minute.
The makeup effects in this movie is commedable. Seeing that Lee Cronin is the director of Evil Dead Rise, it makes sense. It’s a callback to the practical effects of cinema. The makeup on poor little Katie (Natalie Grace) is some Exorcist-level impressive feat. Unlike Weapons, which didn’t know whether it wanted to be a social commentary horror film or a goofball comedy, The Mummy (which has nothing to do with the 1999 Brendan Fraser film) knows everyone has done an Exorcist flick and failed. So it has fun with itself, taking on a Sam Raimi-like spirit without going as far as he does. The flick doesn’t take itself seriously, even though some horrific things happen in it. There’s a VHS sequence that echoes The Ring that will have you wishing you had closed your eyes. But you also want to see. That’s when the picture is working at its best. At its worst, it is when the movie is trying to establish its characters.
The family in this movie is the prototypical clueless fools who don’t know when they’re in grave danger when it’s staring them right in the face. It’s not just in this reviewer’s opinion. There were about two or three moments when the audience laughed at the characters. Specifically, Larissa Cannon (Laia Costa), who keeps trying to fix things that are clearly beyond her control. For such a poorly written character, or perhaps in Cornin’s defense, she’s intentionally dumb, Laia Costa does a decent job acting her way through the script. At the same time, her husband Charlie (Jack Reynor) sounds like he’s phoning in some of his lines. Even during one of his character’s meltdowns at a pivotal scene, he doesn’t sound the way he should. His character is written as the smarter of the two knuckleheads in a relationship. Charlie is a journalist, so he takes his family wherever the work requires him to go. In this case, it’s Cairo. Is it safe there? Supposedly, the family is well compensated. Yet what if the job were in Iran for one year? Also, why doesn’t Charlie know Arabic? Perhaps it’s because of how many places he has to fly to.
One day, the two find out that their missing daughter is still alive. When they retrieve her, she looks like a mummified corpse. Katie is unpredictable and violent, yet she goes home. When she’s taken upstairs, her wheelchair bangs loudly against two flights of narrow, wooden stairs. Why didn’t they install an elevator if they have so much money? If you’re sensitive to watching children get harmed, this movie may not be for you. Whatever is possessing Katie has made her a demon. And demons must shed their skin.
The gore is unapologetically grotesque, and the director is having a blast making the audience regret ordering an extra butter popcorn bucket for their showing. By being aware of the genre it’s playing, the film’s shock value pays off. All the stuff with the forgettable parents keeps some of the amazing sequences from making Lee Cronin’s The Mummy any more memorable. Still, it’s worth seeing with a large audience, if there is one, for the communal scares and hisses at the clueless characters. When the movie goes hard, it’s worth checking out on a big screen, not your flat-screen with daylight glaring through it.
