Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Review

The Mummy hasn’t had much luck at the box office in recent years. There was the Tom Cruise-led affair and the ‘Dark Universe,’ which went nowhere, of course, and now we know we’re getting a return with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. That’ll be more family-friendly and make for some theme park rides. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is, as silly as the name is, this director’s take on the classic monster character. And at least with the title, you know that you’re in for something a bit different and for a gore-filled take from the director of Evil Dead Rising.

Running off the tagline “What happened to Katie?” The film is both a Mummy film and one with more in common with The Exorcist and The Omen than with the classic Mummy stories. Katie is a young girl who goes missing while in Egypt, where her parents are living at the time. Eight years later, she turns up again, but she’s a husk of a human being. Her body is a malnourished horror that is somewhat grotesque to look at, and she is an unresponsive shell. The doctors say she is perfectly healthy, however, and somehow, though no one has any understanding of where she’s been and what’s happened to her in these eight years. The answer, as much as the marketing wants to make it seem like some twist, is simply in the title: she is Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.

When Katie returns home, the majority of the film then turns into some version of what you’d expect to see in the films I mentioned previously, The Omen and Orphan, which also stand out as comparisons. There’s a little girl whose parents refuse to see past what’s in front of them, even as her skin and body seem to be falling apart in unnatural ways, and they think she’ll just come right. Meanwhile, Katie is doing slowly, beginning to twist and play games with those in the home.

A build-up from slow, gross-out moments culminates in a more horrific, blood-soaked finale, where the film feels more like an untitled follow-up to Evil Dead Rise. There’s some inventive body-horror here, including a moment with a scorpion that stands out as something I haven’t seen before among all the many horror films I’ve watched. But where the horror builds into true nastiness that may work for some looking for that sort of thing, it’s the script and narrative here that’ll leave more to be desired.

I don’t know how Lee Cronin’s The Mummy ended up at nearly two-and-a-half hours, but as it drew closer and closer to that runtime, I began to realise just how long this film was, and that it didn’t have half the characters or narrative need to do such a thing. Other than X, who is playing an investigator in Egypt looking into Katie’s disappearance and attempting to re-trace steps, there’s barely an interesting character here to grab onto or care about.

Aiming for unpleasantness and gross-out horror in a big way, Lee Cronin succeeds in making it hard for some to stomach, I’m sure. I heard a few groans and remarks during key scenes, which is a testament to this. If the biggest issue is a lack of engaging story or characters, it’s not a big success.