Lee Cronin's The Mummy
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
A clever, funny and blood dripping tribute to the original "Omen", "Se7en" and his own "Evil Dead Rise", LEE CRONIN'S THE MUMMY is an absolute thrill ride of gore.
Ignore the dullards who are bitching about it being "too long", Cronin's got a hell of a story to tell and I loved every minute of it.
First of all, this has NOTHING to do with the superb Brendan Fraser "Mummy" movies. There is nothing family friendly about this one, especially if you are the Cannon family.
Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor from "Midsommar") is a TV news reporter stationed in Cairo for the past few years with his wife Larissa (Laia Costa) a nurse. They have a daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) and young son Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams). Just as they are about to celebrate Charlie's reassignment back in the states, Katie is taken.
I wont say much about the scene, because it's so well structured, blending the horror of a Father realizing his daughter is gone and an epic sandstorm that might just be a tribute to the massive haboob in 1999's "The Mummy".
We saw the film in Dolby Cinema and the sound during this sequence was fantastic, just the first of many times that wind, sand and bumps in the night circled around my head, along with the screams of onlookers.
Reynor and Costa are great as parents facing the ultimate horror of their daughter gone missing in a foreign land. They are the outsiders, with only a first time police detective Dalia Zaki (a terrific May Calamawy) on their side.
There seem to be no clues to who took Katie or where she is.
The film jumps forward 8 years.
Charlie and Larissa have moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, living with Larissa's mother Carmen. Veronica Falcon (Ozark, Jungle Cruise) is terrific as Carmen, a grandma with a hilarious streak and a deep faith. She'll need it.
Sebastian (now played by Shilo Molina) is in high school and his 8 year old sister Maud (Billie Roy) are finding their way, nearly a decade since their sister's disappearance.
Out of the blue, the family gets a call from Cairo that Katie has been found.
Cronin reveals all this with a mysterious set of well structured scenes that appear unrelated to the tale. They will all serve as clever pieces of the puzzle later. I'll say nothing more about how and where Katie has been found.
Charlie and Larissa go to get their daughter. But is this really Katie? Catatonic with bursts of violence and guttural noises, she's a terrifying little creature. The film roles into serious "Exorcist" territory from here on out, very effectively.
They take Katie (now played by Natalie Grace) back home, with Larissa confident that her nursing background will bring her daughter back from the edge.
Cronin delivers relentless "Poltergeist" vibes as Katie sits in her bedroom.
Remember when little Charlie would clack her jaws together in Ari Aster's "Hereditary"? Cronin triples down on the creep with Katie's insane jaws. Kudos to the makeup team and Grace for what must have been countless hours in the makeup chair.
Secret passages, sprawling crawl ways, giant desert scorpions and hidden parts of the huge old house in the desert serve up a perfect playground for Cronin to scare the hell out of us. As in "Poltergeist", night time isn't exactly the best time to be inside this home.
As their daughter demonstrates more and more violent tendencies and some truly gross habits, the family begins to fracture.
Charlie makes a startling discovery in a sequence that brought me back to sitting in a huge movie theater in 1976 watching David Warner as the photographer in "The Omen" developing those haunting pictures foretelling death.
Charlie's meeting with an archeology expert Professor Bixler (Mark Mitchinson, perfectly cast) is perfect, spooky and took me back to Gregory Peck meeting with Bugenhagen in "The Omen". Haunting film moments like these are not easy to conjure, but Cronin creates them seamlessly.
Charlie sends his findings to Detective Zaki, now with eight years on the job and devoted to find out what happened to Katie. The story structure is perfect, as we pop back and forth between the horrors of what's happening inside the Albuquerque home and Zaki's "Se7en"-like detective thriller in Egypt.
When those two story lines meet, fasten your seatbelt.
Cronin's final half hour is a tour-de-force of sheer movie-making cojones.
It's absolutely mad, over-the-top, gory, crazy and packed with jaw dropping moments. I never left the front edge of my seat. The funeral viewing in the living room is a twisted, revolting commitment to taking the viewer right to the edge with deft jolts of humor to make the revulsion more palatable. Cronin's like a great chef at work, serving up exactly what & when he wants to feed you.
WTF moments abound.
Composer Stephen McKeon (Evil Dead Rise) serves up a massive score of sliding strings and full orchestra screams that I wouldn't want to listen to at night. It's a flawless callback to the spirit Goldsmith's score for "Poltergeist", but wholly original.
If you walk into the film expecting cloth wrapped, lumbering mummies or ancient pharaoh curses, you're in the wrong spot. But if you want a horror thrill ride blended with a mystery that delivers true, smart surprises, LEE CRONIN'S THE MUMMY has that wrapped up. I didn't like this one, I loved it. It gets an A.
Cronin's earned that name above the title in bloody superb fashion.
Warning: if you don't like gore or body horror, don't see this one. It's relentlessly gross and bloody in all the right ways.
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