Director: Dan Allen
Year: 2019
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Mummy
Plot:
Struggling to care for her brother, a desperate woman hatches a plan to rob her boss during a going-out-of-business sale and hock some expensive jewelry, but when they inadvertently trigger the mummy into reviving and rampaging through the group, they’re forced to stop it once again.
Review:
This was a decent enough, if somewhat troublesome, genre effort. Among the brighter factors within here is the rather fun starting point that makes the whole process here feel far more earned and necessary than most other attempts in the genre. The early focus on the monetary struggles they’re facing, as her constant need for money to deal with her special-needs brother and the bills they’re facing, brings about the kind of storyline that makes it easy to sympathize with her trying her best but ending up over her head in the series of adult issues she’s suddenly forced to undertake. That her job is suddenly ending out of the blue, that she needed to keep him in her care, makes her all the more desperate to get him taken care of. This is nice enough at providing the necessary starting points for the main girl to get her motivations and relationship sorted out, which puts the heist plan in motion with her friends and serves to make the latter half have a great throughline to make everything have an extra bit of interest throughout it.
Once they arrive at the manor house with the stolen goods, the action picks up and the series of confrontations with the mummy becomes far more interesting. The whole idea of the group being so mistrustful about what’s going on or who’s trying to short-change them out of the deal that they start to turn on each other to the point of failing to recognize the mummy’s been resurrected and out hunting them is a solid concept to give everything a lot to like overall. There are some fun stalking scenes and confrontations throughout here with the mummy taking over and possessing several of the group to be its followers, focusing on some cheesy setups to get them separated and under its control so that it can take the rest out and recover the jewels it needs to enhance its powers to take over the world. This makes for some solid attacks and defenses against that drive some cheesy action along the way, making everything here have some solid factors going for it.
There are some drawbacks to the film that hold this down. The main issue with this one is the wholly unlikable and flat-out irritating main group of characters that we’re trying to follow, even the more sympathetic ones. While the girl who’s trying to look after her disabled brother has her heart in the right place and you can tell she’s trying to take care of him, the whole plot point about stealing a sacred mummy’s amulet from her boss after finding out that her job has been eliminated after the company is dissolved makes her incredibly weird about being involved with the unscrupulous kinds hijacking the mummy. Her brother is obviously special and needs intense care, but he’s allowed to roam free and get in the way of everything when it’s the wrong moment, when his condition takes over, rendering his scenes more frustrating than endearing. The rest of the group are usual sort of one-dimensional, self-centered lot, more concerned with getting high or satisfied, making them so interchangeable and forgettable that most of them don’t even have a memorable name that we can use for them, causing the group to be immensely underwhelming.
This one also suffers from a series of rather problematic filmmaking techniques that make it somewhat difficult to become immersed in the film. The cheap, one-location setting means that there’s very little chance to get away from the house in the countryside that this takes place in, as it has little change in the few big scenes utilized to try to make sense of the situation they’ve found themselves in. Other big giveaways, from the general lack of high-energy action with the mummy taking centerstage to the kills being quite simplified overall and even the concept of a mummy wandering around in a place with no sand or Egyptian relics, there’s quite a lot here that gives the film a cheap tone and feel. The last big issue here is a goofy sequence involving the mummy and his cohorts taking out a group of stoners in the middle of the woods that has no build-up, little purpose for being there beyond adding to the body count, and just comes off silly as a whole, coming together to lower this one.
Overview: **.5/5
A watchable enough but overly flawed genre effort, there’s enough to like here that it’s not a complete waste, but it has more than enough issues keeping it from being anything more than that. Those with an interest in this style or approach, or who are fans of the creative crew, will be the main focus here, as most others out there should heed caution.
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