When visiting the movie theater recently, I saw a large display advertising the new romantic comedy "You, Me & Tuscany" about a young American woman who visits a villa in Italy and falls in love with a handsome local. The tagline on this display read, “She Came for the Pasta and Got Lost in the Sauce.” The moment I read that tagline, I thought, “I should have never learned to read as a child. Because then I would not have read such a terrible sentence.”
My standards of creativity are obviously much different than the marketers for this film. But after reading that stupid phrase, I could not watch You, Me & Tuscany with any good faith. I still have not watched that romantic comedy. Instead, I recently watched a tired horror film called "The Mummy" written and directed by Lee Cronin ("Evil Dead Rise," 2023).
Blumhouse is a commercially successful film studio well-known for producing or co-producing many mainstream horror pictures. Some of these good pictures include "Paranormal Activity" (2007), "Get Out" (2017), and "The Invisible Man" (2020). Blumhouse has also given us many dumpster fires, and the new release "The Mummy" is one of them. If people don’t remember, Tom Cruise already destroyed the entire concept, premise, and universe of the ancient, undead, Egyptian monster in the disastrous 2017 adventure called "The Mummy."
So when something doesn’t work, current-day Hollywood must try it again eventually, and the latest gravedigger to try resurrecting this famous movie monster is Irish filmmaker Lee Cronin. To avoid any potential confusion, this newly released film is officially titled "Lee Cronin’s The Mummy," and it’s the most forgettable and frustrating film I’ve seen so far this year.
While temporarily living in Egypt, a traditional family suffers a tragedy when their young daughter is abducted from their home. Eight years later, when the family is back in their American home in New Mexico, their daughter is discovered in Egypt lying in a stone sarcophagus wrapped in strips of tattered leather. The parents are overjoyed, they bring their daughter home, and spooky stuff starts happening. Toenail clippings, loose teeth, and patches of peeled skin all point to the same sign: the mummified daughter is possessed and spiritually poisoning her home.
This version of "The Mummy" tries to be like one half "The Exorcist" (1973) and one half "Poltergeist" (1982). While the domestic setting is tormented with violence and girly whispers, a police detective in Egypt researches the background of the sarcophagus. Of course being rated R, this has a lot of blood, a lot of torture, and a campily dramatic death scene. But what surprised me about this was the copious amount of saliva. So much spitting and drooling is in this which doesn’t make it scary or exciting, it just makes the film gross.
All the dialogue is written with the emotional depth of an Etch-a-Sketch drawing, and too many of the moments meant to be scary are heavily referential to other horror films everyone already knows. "The Mummy" reminded me of the 2023 horror catastrophe, "The Exorcist: Believer" where everything is a mess, none of the acting is believable, and the creativity is a bore. But at least the nuclear family is defended and kept intact. What a relief. Right? Wrong!
People need to stop the conveyor belt of horror monster remakes immediately. Whomever is trying to reimagine these movie monsters should get more creative. Who’s scared of doing that?
