Pinging the Qualitative Gore Index deep into the red this week is Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), a grosser-than-gross goop ‘n’ spew ‘n’ splatfest in which Lee Cronin is NOT the mummy, because that apostrophe functions as possessive, not as a contraction. The lite grammar lesson is a marked bonus for a movie that not only frequently tests our gag reflex, but also has us wondering: Who is Lee Cronin, and why does he get the Tyler Perry-style pre-title treatment? Well, he got our stomachs churning with 2023’s gloopstravaganza Evil Dead Rise. And his name is there so the film can differentiate itself from other undead-Egyptian-mythological-whatnot properties – the classic Boris Karloff horror film, the early-CGI blockbuster franchise starring Brendan Fraser, the 2017 Tom Cruise dud – and still market something familiar to audiences. And the result is an overcomplicated, overlong, logic-deprived mess that had me cackling at how disgusting it is.
The Gist: This cold open scene – well, it’s mostly pointless. Just notch the reveal of a small pyramid structure and a sarcophagus in a dungeon-like cellar for later reference, and move on to the real story here, about the Cannon family. They live in Cairo. Charlie (Jack Raynor) is a TV news reporter, Larissa (Laia Costa) is a nurse, and they have two kids, Seb (Dean Allen Williams) and Katie (Emily Mitchell), with a third pending. One fateful day, little Katie is lured to a secluded corner of the yard by a strange woman (Hayat Kamille), baiting her with candy. The woman hands Katie a tangerine and a large beetle emerges from it and forces itself into Katie’s mouth. The woman snatches the girl and scampers off, Charlie on her tail. But a sandstorm whips up and Charlie loses her and Detective Dalia (May Calamawy) is on the case but she gets nowhere and bang: EIGHT YEARS LATER, reads a subtitle. No happy ending for this one.
At this point, the Cannons have resettled in America, specifically at the big isolated desert home near Albuquerque, where Larissa grew up. The family lives with her mother, Carmen (Veronica Falcon), Seb is now played by Shylo Molina, and their new daughter is Maud (Billie Roy). Life goes on. Back in Egypt, a dude fixes is bike as a plane plummets from the sky behind him and when he checks the wreck the most disturbing thing he finds is not a man impaled through the face on a tree limb with an eyeball on the ground, but that same sarcophagus from the cold open. Curious. Officials retrieve it and crack it open to find teenage Katie (Natalie Grace) in there, against-all-odds alive.
Now of course Larissa and Charlie want their daughter back and love her unconditionally, but the state Katie’s in should have them pondering some conditions. She ain’t all there mentally, her skin is leathery, her gaze is vacant in a terrifyingly malevolent kind of way and I don’t even want to get into the toenail situation. Doctors say she just needs to be comfy at home to rest and heal up and she’ll be just fine and I say the Cannons should get a second opinion, possibly from an exorcist, but they can’t hear me through the TV screen.
First thing Katie does when she gets home is headbutt Grandma and do a crackity-bones body contortion that requires Larissa to hit the kid with the ol’ epi-pen tranquilizer – and yet her parents insist that they can take care of her just fine. Now, this is one of those Movie Houses with significant space behind the walls for some reason, and that reason is so the family can hear thumping noises and go back there and chase Katie through dimly lit, heavily cobwebbed corridors until she finds a rather large scorpion and swallows it whole, which functions as foreshadowing for a future scene where – well, no spoilers. But it’s definitely not a spoiler to say it’s really really really really really really gross.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Cronin is pretty deeply indebted to The Exorcist and other demonic-possession movies, and some vestiges of Sam Raimi linger from Cronin’s previous film.
Performance Worth Watching: The cast is fine here, nothing exemplary. But hats way, way off for the practical-FX crew, who one imagines is a conglomeration of the kids you remember from elementary school who stirred together various cafeteria foods to create the most horrendous liquid glop possible.
Sex And Skin: No time for any of that.
Our Take: I don’t think Cronin’s goal with his Mummy is to deliver a simple, brief, logical narrative – hence why I discard such criticisms in this case. No, his goal absolutely must be to bring the squick with a furious vengeance. Sure, we have to wade through Det. Dalia snooping around, some nonsense with an old VHS tape, a consultation with a professor of Egyptology and other vaguely necessary plot curlicues that push the film to a near-unforgivable 134 minutes. But from the narrative tangle leap moments that are so repugnant, you have no choice but to laugh.
I therefore was entertained – highly at times – by a movie with a shaggy mess of a screenplay and not much in the way of thematic intent. But it has The Toenail Scene, more than one wildly creative display of diabolical barfing (call ’em variants of The Exorcist’s signature projectile-puking moment) and enough peeling flesh for several lifetimes. Cronin directs the living shit out of those moments, his camerawork either a tool for comedy – highlight: the tumbling-down-the-steps POV cam – or a means to take in and admire every last inch of glistening pus, bile, miscellaneous viscera or combinations thereof. Some movies are suggestive, and this is not one of them.
Cronin’s tone is a misshapen melange of utter grimness and twinkle-in-the-eye sadistic humor. It works slightly more than it doesn’t. One could extract some insight from the depiction of a marriage stressed by one’s offspring being consumed from the inside out by a protege of Apep, or witness the face-only-a-mother-could-love notion tested to its absolute breaking point. But let’s be real – we’re not here for character development or other such high-minded components of traditional storytelling. We’re here for the necro-aesthetic, gravity-defying spewage and all the other yucks Cronin can possibly deliver. If you were expecting another movie in which a man wrapped in Cottonelle staggers and moans a lot, you may want to look elsewhere.
Our Call: You can criticize Lee Cronin’s The Mummy for its myriad flaws, or cackle at how hard he brings the blecch. Remember, laughing is always more fun. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.