The qualitative Gore index is set to push into the deep red this week Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), an even grosser fuck ‘n’ spew ‘n’ splatfest in which Lee Cronin isn’t a mummy, because that apostrophe functions as a possessive, not a contraction. The light grammar lesson is a notable bonus to a movie that not only repeatedly tests our gag reflex, but also makes us wonder: Who is Lee Cronin, and why does he get the Tyler Perry-style pre-title treatment? Well, they made our stomachs churn with the Glopstravaganza of 2023 evil dead rise. And his name is there so the film can differentiate itself from other undead-Egyptian-mythology-whatnot properties – the classic Boris Karloff horror movie, the early-CGI blockbuster franchise starring Brendan Fraser, the 2017 Tom Cruise dude – and still market something familiar to audiences. And the result is an overly complex, long-winded, logic-defying mess that surprises me with just how disgusting it is.
Summary: This cold open scene – well, it’s mostly pointless. Note the revelation of a small pyramidal structure and a sarcophagus in a dungeon-like basement for later reference, and move on to the real story about the Cannon family here. He lives in Cairo. Charlie (Jack Reynor) is a TV news reporter, Larissa (Lia Costa) is a nurse, and they have two children, Seb (Dean Allen Williams) and Katie (Emily Mitchell), and a third is pending. One fateful day, little Katie is lured by Candy to a secluded corner of the yard by a strange woman (Hayat Kamili). The woman hands Katie a tangerine and a large beetle comes out of it and forces its way into Katie’s mouth. The woman snatches the girl and runs away, leaving Charlie behind. But a sandstorm comes and Charlie gets lost and Detective Dalia (Mae Calamaavi) is on the case but she can’t get anywhere and Collide: Eight years later, reads a subtitle. There is no happy ending to this.
At this point, the Canons have re-settled in the US, specifically in the large isolated desert house near Albuquerque, where Larissa grew up. The family lives with his mother, Carmen (Veronica Falcon), Seb, now played by Shiloh Molina, and their new daughter Maude (Billie Roy). Life goes on. In Egypt, a man is repairing a bike as a plane falls out of the sky behind him and when he examines the wreckage the most disturbing thing he finds is not a man with his eyeball crumpled to the ground through the face on a tree trunk, but the same cold-opened coffin. curious. The officers retrieve it and open it and find teenage Katie (Natalie Grace) alive against all odds.
Now of course Larissa and Charlie want their daughter back and love her unconditionally, but given the situation Katie is in, there are some conditions to consider. He’s not mentally well, his skin is leathery, his gaze is terrifyingly malevolent and I don’t even want to get into the toenail situation. The doctors say she needs to rest and be comfortable at home to recover and she will be just fine and I say the Canons should get a second opinion, possibly from an exorcist, but they can’t hear me through the TV screen.
The first thing Katie does when she gets home is to headbutt Grandma and cause a creaky-bones body contortion that requires Larissa to kill the baby with an old Epi-Pen tranquilizer – and yet her parents insist they can take care of her just fine. Now, this is one of those movie houses that has a significant amount of space behind the walls for some reason, and that reason is so the family can hear the thumping sounds and go back there and chase Katie through dimly lit, heavily netted corridors until she finds a huge scorpion and swallows it whole, which serves as foreshadowing for a future scene where – well, no spoilers. But it certainly wouldn’t be wrong to say that it’s really, really, really crappy.
Which movies will it remind you of? Cronin is largely indebted to Exorcist and other demon-possession films, and some remnants of Sam Raimi’s take on Cronin’s previous film.
Performances worth watching: The cast here is good, nothing exemplary. But that’s a lot of trouble for the Practical-FX crew, who one imagines is a bunch of elementary school kids mixing various cafeteria foods together to create the most terrifying liquid glop possible.
Gender and skin: No time for any of this.
Our view: I don’t think Cronin’s goal is with him Mother The aim is to present a simple, concise, logical narrative – so I reject such criticisms in this case. No, his goal must surely be to exact fierce vengeance on the wicked. Of course, we have to go through the date. Dalia’s snooping around, some fooling around with an old VHS tape, consulting with a professor of Egyptology and other vaguely necessary plot twists that push the film to an almost unforgivable 134 minutes. But the moments that emerge from the narrative confusion are so disgusting that you have no choice but to laugh.
So I was entertained – sometimes excessively – by a film that was poorly scripted and didn’t quite live up to its thematic intent. But there’s The Toenail Scene, more than one wildly creative display of devilish barfing (call them that). Exorcist’s signature projectile-puking moment) and enough peeled meat to last several lifetimes. Cronin directs the live content of those moments, his camerawork either a tool for comedy – highlight: the downward-slanting POV cam – or a means to take in and admire every last inch of glistening pus, bile, miscellaneous intestine or a combination thereof. Some movies are thought provoking, and this is not one of them.
Cronin’s tone is a twisted combination of pure seriousness and winking sadistic humor. It does a little more than it doesn’t. One can gain some insight from the depiction of a marriage that is strained by having one’s offspring eaten from the inside out by a disciple of Apep, or see the notion of only-a-mother-can-love-face tested to its absolute breaking point. But let’s be real – we’re not here for character development or other high-minded components of traditional storytelling. We’re here for all things necro-beauty, gravity-defying spooze, and more Yes Cronin can probably deliver. If you were expecting another movie in which a man wrapped in cottontails stumbles and groans profusely, you may want to look elsewhere.
Our call: you can criticize Lee Cronin’s The Mummy For its myriad flaws, or to tease him about how hard he works to get bleach. Remember, laughing is always more fun. Stream it.
John Srba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog once hugged him.
