Movie Review: The Mummy (1999)

Idris Hsi, May 21, 1999

Thanks to J.D. Forinash, Joel Fuernsinn, and Avinash Honkan for their contributions and editing.

What can I say about The Mummy? Let's start with the good stuff. This is definitely a pretty cool monster. It's indestructable, has great magical powers, is able to transform itself, and is a walking Roach Motel. One of the complaints that I've always had with traditional mummies (and zombies) is that they'd always stalk their victims, hands outstretched to choke them to death, in this ... very ... slow ... stalking ... manner ... that ... a ... four ... year ... old ... child ... could ... escape ... but ... not ... grown ... adults. So this Mummy was believably lethal. The special effects aren't too bad.

This is a Disney movie. My theory is that it's a stealth Disney movie. It's the kind of movie that the evil mouse and fellow mouseketeers would make if they were going to try and make a horror movie. Here's why:

It's vaguely educational, if you're interested in ancient Egyptian history / pseudo-mythology.
Excepting the horror elements (peeling flesh, sores, rivers of blood, people catching on fire), it's really squeaky clean. Even the nude princess at the beginning of the scene is wearing a body suit or something that makes her slightly less revealing than something out of the SI swimsuit issue.
You don't really see anyone die - it's kind of abstracted out behind fast effects and cut scenes.
The heroes are really wholesome (even the slightly irritating, less than straight-arrow, brother of the heroine) and you expect them at any moment to turn to the camera and tell the kids not to do this at home.
The foreshadowing has all the subtlety of the towers in Kuala Lumpur (One character says, "I hate bugs," early on. Gee, I wonder what's going to happen next.)
The dialogue has all the sophistication of a preschool Thanksgiving play ("We're in trouble." comes up a lot).
The characters are all downloaded archetypes: Professor, Clueless Sidekick (the one who asks stupid questions so the audience knows what's going on), The Hero, The Damsel in Distress, The Mysterious Stranger, The Greedy Competitors, The Whining Evil Sidekick, and so on.

The whole thing is almost a horror movie but has this "wink wink" quality that supports my Disney theory and really kills the horror parts. The latter half of the movie should have been retitled "Evil Dead 5." In fact, there's a scene near the beginning of the movie where some idiot reads aloud out of the evil, nasty Book of the Dead and we all sat in our seats chanting "Klatu, Veratu, Nic<cough cough cough>."

Without giving too much away, this is a *great* bad movie. There's a lot of inconsistencies and character stupidities that make this movie rich for the hecklers out there. Here are the drive-in totals:

Bad opening computer sequence
Lots of dead bodies.
Hundreds of scarabs (really, just 2-3 herds worth of scarabs with some
accidental freelancers)
Lots of possessed, chanting people of Cairo.
15 lesser mummies: good, bad, and indifferent
1 virtually naked woman
1 backstabbing by above naked woman (evil women...)
2 hired help eaten by scarabs
3 hired help splashed by salt acid (whatever that is)
4 hired help crushed by rocks
4 hired help swept away by sandstorm
6 hired help shot by Magi (are we seeing a pattern yet?)
3 American competitors/mummy fodder - (I called them Larry, Moe, and Curly
- you knew they were Americans because they went to the Leonardo
diCaprio School of Acting American - speak with a vague Western accent,
use lots of lame colloquialisms, and act like a rude, country rustic.)
Scarab rush hour
1 Three Stooges eye-poke
1 tired, falling, domino-like bookshelf routine
1 boat fire (a *really* fast fire)
1 Horses vs. Camels race (does anyone know what the average running speed
of a laden camel is compared to that of a horse?)
1 piss-poor car crash into random fountain in middle of large plaza
1 plane crash into selective quicksand
1 convenient sewer exit in middle of 1900's Cairo
7 out of 10 plagues of Egypt
Kung Fu
Gun Fu
Cat Fu
Sword Fu
Dynamite Fu
Sandstorm Fu
Scarab Fu
Mummifying Fu (the process of which is called MummyFu-cation - This is also JD's fault. foxtrot@cc.gatech.edu)

Good Movie Scale: 4 out of 10
Bad Movie Scale: 8 out of 10.