The first thing you may wonder about Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is… who the hell is Lee Cronin? He’s certainly not a household name, and it appears that Warner Bros. tacked his name onto this just so audiences wouldn’t confuse it with those Brendan Fraser movies. A simpler and more effective solution would have been to just rename the movie entirely, because it really bears little resemblance to any Mummy story you may be familiar with.
For those who are too lazy to google Lee Cronin, his one well known film is the wonderfully wicked Evil Dead Rise.
The Mummy feels like it’s based on a discarded early draft of that movie.
A 135-minute movie that could easily have been 90 minutes long, The Mummy is the latest version of your pretty typical possessed child tale—the problem is that Cronin seems to think he’s fooling everybody that what we’re watching is something more profound.
A girl returns years after disappearing, discovered in an Egyptian sarcophagus and amazingly “alive” despite looking absolutely wretched. The parents laughingly take her back with open arms (understandable) and yet ignore clear signs that she is highly disturbed and not at all the kid they know (ridiculous). Cronin plays all of this off with innate seriousness, which makes The Mummy funny—but not in an intentional way.
As Cronin proved with Evil Dead Rise, he’s great at body horror, and The Mummy offers up more of the same. There are some great gory moments and disgusting things that occur, and it’s in these stretches that the film really thrives. For what it is, The Mummy has a lot of solid horror elements.
It’s just so stuffed with other things—unearned drama, forced linkage to Egypt to make the title sort of, slightly make sense, excessive buildup—that by the time Cronin really dives in, you already have one foot out of the tomb.
Body horror fans should check this one out, but there are countless other possession flicks that tell the same story in less time. Let’s have Cronin deliver a few more wins before we tack his name onto a movie title again, shall we?
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.