A hyper gory take on The Mummy mythos hits streaming
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy isn’t necessarily a “mummy” movie in the sense we’re most accustomed to. We don’t have Boris Karloff shambling around in the shadows, or Brendan Fraser ready to go Simon Belmont on some fools, or Tom Cruise doing whatever he did in that one Mummy movie that came out a few years back. Ultimately, it’s a film that feels far more like a variation on Pet Semetary, with AMPLE Evil Dead and The Exorcist influences baked into the proverbial cake.
The Mummy, really, should’ve been called The Daughter. Instead of bandaged Egyptian royalty stumbling around in zombie mode, the primary antagonist of this film is a demonically possessed little girl … and probably the first canonical Taylor Swift fanatic possessed little girl in the history of cinema. And yes, that’s actually a somewhat important plot point to the movie, believe it or not.
Where to begin? Oh yeah, the very beginning of the movie. Duh. So we’ve got a seemingly possessed mother crushing pet birds to death and what do you know, the family just so happens to have an evil sarcophagus in their basement and whatever’s inside it really, really likes tearing people limb from limb. Without spoiling too much of the story, try not to get too attached to ANYBODY featured in the first ten minutes of this movie.
From there we’re introduced to the Cannon brood, an American family living in Cairo. The daughter figure, unbeknownst to her parents, has a “secret” best friend lurking in the bushes in their backyard and she really wants to infect her with pure evil (more on the sordid details later, dear reader.) Well, one thing leads to another and the little girl straight up vanishes and we do a time leap forward and the Cannons are stuck in New Mexico and everything seems super boring — then they get a phone call out of the blue from the U.S. consulate in Egypt letting them know that, against all odds, not only did they finally find their daughter, but she’s still alive, too.
Of course, saying the daughter is alive is a VERY loose interpretation of the term. For one thing, she’s got a head that looks like somebody tried to ram Miss Piggy face first through a cheese grater. Forget “Dermatologically challenged,” the daughter in this movie looks like something that crawled out of a George Romero movie and got stuck in a tanning bed for a couple of days. You can almost smell the rotting flesh wafting off the screen and, yeah, it’s a very gross (and effective) visual.
At first the recovered daughter isn’t too talkative. But as it turns out, she’s developed some kind of telepathic powers and she’s really fond of telling other children to disobey their parents and commit mild cases of homicide. Now, from the outset it’s glaringly apparent that something ain’t right with this tyke, but keeping with horror tradition, nobody in the movie thinks anything is awry even though the character looks like a cross between Frankenstein and a Cabbage Patch Doll and keeps saying the “c-word” all the time. A few extended family members are introduced and you just KNOW their days are numbered … IN BLOOD. You know, because they get killed and stuff.
Admittedly, The Mummy is a bit slow. Like, we have to wait until the one-hour mark before the proverbial poo poo hits the hypothetical fan and even then there’s WAY too much stalling for time. The end result is a movie that gives us little flashes of gunge and gore, then when the third act kicks in it’s just blood bath city, population “us as viewers.” We’ve got little kids ripping the stitches out of corpses and peeling strips of skin off their own legs and biting everybody in sight — and then, some really gross stuff starts happening. Without giving away too many trade secrets, keep in mind that this is a film that has multiple scenes of various people puking goo and demonic scorpions into one another’s mouths. Personally, I stopped counting after the fourth time it happened in this movie.
We get some resolution as the movie nears its grand finale. For example, there’s a major subplot in there about a cult that likes to videotape all of their unholy rituals (way to make the prosecution’s work a cakewalk, guys!) and sure enough, the paint the walls with intestines conclusion even includes an obvious nod and wink to Army of Darkness. Just, uh, with more severe trachea damage, though. The ending obviously sets up a sequel, but who knows if we’ll ever get one — but with $90 million in box office receipts against a $22 million budget, I’ve got a feeling Lee Cronin’s The Mummy II: Mummy Harder is certainly within the realm of possibility.
The ensemble cast in The Mummy is good, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s a film rife with great performances. This is obviously a movie where the true stars are the special effects and this movie definitely does not disappoint when it comes to the guts, gore and general mayhem. I kinda tuned out in the second act (which is glacially slow at times), but the movie eventually won me back in the third, when all of the pretense is dropped and the film turns into an unapologetic plasma parade … complete with a stolen dentures attack sequence that feels like something culled from an old episode of The Simpsons.
I guess the big, existential question with Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is whether it does anything new with one of the few truly evergreen properties in horror media. Honestly, this movie isn’t going to win many originality points — indeed, almost all of its major gore set pieces are clearly influenced by previous movies. It’s a movie that does a LOT of homages, yet it struggles to form a concrete identity of its own. You kind of get the impression that Cronin had a lot of cool death scenes in mind and he basically wrote the rest of the movie around that. My main takeaway when this nearly two and half hour-plus film was over was simply “huh, I guess he really wants to make another Evil Dead movie.” The line between tribute and knock-off is a narrow one, indeed.
It’s a lazy way to wrap up a review, but your mileage is going to vary on this one. Some viewers are going to think it’s a thrilling, blood-soaked supernatural barf-fest (literally), while others may be bored to tears by its formulaic nature. But it’s never a totally dull picture, even when it falls into the doldrums. I guess the bigger question is what’s next: Lee Cronin’s Creature From The Black Lagoon or Lee Cronin’s This Island Earth?
GIVE IT A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Children in peril, scorpion vomit, the last Evil Dead movie
Director: Lee Cronin
Writer: Lee Cronin
Starring: Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamway, Natalie Grace
Studio: New Line Cinema/Atomic Monster Pictures/Blumhouse Productions/Wicked-Good
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Language: English
Runtime: 133 minutes
Release Date: May 19, 2026 (VOD)
