Since we’re getting a new Mummy movie meant as a stand-alone thing unrelated to the old, forsaken Dark Universe, i’ve figured instead of reviewing again 2017’s The Mummy and boring myself to tears, i might be more interesting to review a random mummy themed horror film i found new on Amazon for 4 bucks and bought sight unseen.
No prior research, just unwrapped the thing from my library and saw it, for a change.
The result of this dice throw is both not good, but also kinda interesting and not as bad as i would have assumed.
Still bad, but the more interesting kind of “bad”.
You’d think this was gonna be a late rip-off attempt to cash into 2017’s The Mummy (remember the Dark Universe?), since it’s a female pharaoh, but not really.
First off, it’s not set in modern times, but it’s framed as a turn of the 19th centhury period drama, and the plot involves an old archeologist on its deathbed entrusting a precious old sarcophagus to his studios nephew (and giving him his journal), but this piques the interest of the archeologist’s other nephew, who happens to own money to a criminal and is blackmailed into giving compensation.
He eyes the sarcophagus hoping to sell it for cash, but things get hairy since the so called “curse” seems to strike the old man like it did to his old excavation partner, which doesn’t stop the greedy nephew to concoct a scheme in order to pacify the mob boss…
It’s kinda clever how it plays against expectation by giving a realistic twist to the “curse”, and in the latter half it lives up to the “resurrection” hinted in the title by going the “Frankenstein route”, which is interesting… even though it’s sketchy and kinda stupid when you think abou it, since it’s all because they want to make off money fast via a scheme involving a burlesque/whorehouse/freak show theathre, and one wonders why the guy doesn’t just leave town.
Plus the realistic approach is thrown to the dogs because the movie still wants to give you what you’d expect, a mummy princess rising again from the dead and killing people…. but it does so in the final 4 minutes of the film, and it’s so utterly brief it almost feels like a joke, besides making for one hell of an anticlimactic ending.
This in a movie with not a lot going on in the plot, very little to be honest, with a lot of characters talking and discussing things in a very limited number of locations, obviously because it’s done on the cheap, as the awful fake ass exterior shots make even more clear.
There is some effort, actual effort put in, which is something, the acting is decent enough for such a low budget affair, i like the occasional bits of dry humour, and the characters are ultimately okay, though they are defined more by their dialogues than their actions, because they don’t do very much at all, the budget couldn’t take it if they did.
It also teases a sequel or some sort of continuation, and why not, it sure as hell was cheap enough, especially since the director, UK based Steve Lawson, has been doing a good number of these adaptations of literary gothic classic of yore (especially since they’re basically public domain works) like Dracula, Jekyll and Hide in recent years, after directing crap like Killersaurus or Nocturnal Activity in the mid-to-late 2010s.
The Mummy Resurrection it’s not good, it’s subpar, at best, so while i don’t recommend it, but it’s also far from the worse thing ever, since this one puts effort, it tries in earnest to be good.
Wise Cafe (International) 