The Mummy (2017): written by Everybody; directed by Action Robot Director 3000; starring Tom Cruise (Lieutenant Jerkstore), Russell Crowe (Actually Acting), Annabelle Wallis (Too Young Love Interest/ Archaeologist), Sofia Boutella (The Enchantress from Suicide Squad), and Jake Johnson (Cheaplaffs Johnson): Such a colossal turd of a movie that it makes the unfortunate The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor shine in one's memory like Lawrence of Arabia.
Solid screenwriters including Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects!), David Koepp (Jurassic Park!), and Jenny Lumet (Rachel Getting Married! Wait, what?) are buried alive by this misguided attempt to turn Universal's monster movies into a Marvel-like shared cinematic universe. That would be Dark Universe, the absurd shared cinematic universe that died about a month after The Mummy died in North American theatres, thus sparing us superhero movies featuring the Invisible Man, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Abbott and Costello.
Did you know that Dracula Untold was the previous attempt to create a shared-universe Universal monster-hero franchise? And before that Hugh Jackman's Van Helsing: will Universal ever learn?
About the only good thing in the movie is Russell Crowe, approaching plumminess as monster-fighter Henry Jekyll (yes, that Jekyll, updated to the modern day). Crowe would really have killed it in those old Hammer Horror movies with Christopher Lee and/or Peter Cushing. I'm not kidding. He manages humour and a slight bit of gravitas despite being knee-capped by this ridiculous script, poor acting, and a frenetically desperate Tom Cruise as a bewilderingly unlikable lead character. Not recommended.
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008): written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar; directed by Rob Cohen; starring Brendan Fraser (Rick O'Connell), Maria Bello (Evelyn O'Connell), Luke Ford (Alex O'Connell), John Hannah (Cheaplaughs Johnson), Jet Li (Wasted), Michelle Yeoh (Also Wasted), and Isabella Leong (2000-year-old Hottie): This attempt to restart The Mummy 'franchise' seven years after The Mummy 2 is pretty dumb. It also steals shameless, almost obsessively, from the Indiana Jones movies rather than its own mediocre franchise self.
Former female lead Rachel Weisz had something better to do in 2007, so Maria Bello, a good actress who neither looks nor sounds like Rachel Weisz, fills in. Set about 15 years after The Mummy 2 so that the son of the characters played by franchise leads Brendan Fraser and (now) Bello can be grown up and possibly continue the franchise for another decade despite the simple fact that the actor playing the son, Luke Ford, is a terrible actor with no charisma. To top things off, we leave good old Egypt because Universal was pioneering the idea of co-financing blockbusters with China.
Yes, we go to China. The movie completely wastes Jet Li as the Emperor and Michelle Yeoh as his ancient witchy karate nemesis. It stretches the concept of 'mummy' to include 'terracotta warriors' and 'evil Emperor trapped alive inside a regenerating clay exoskeleton' and 'strangely unrotted people buried under the Great Wall of China for hundreds of years without any mummification procedure being intentionally tried on them.'
Honestly, a bunch of British bog-men could be the features of some nightmarishly goofy fourth movie, though this movie ends ominously with a brief bit about Peruvian mummies. Thankfully, The Mummy: Fitzcarraldo the Right Thing has never appeared.
There are some Yetis here, good guys for once. Some CGI stuff happens, none of it convincingly. The bad living people are transparent stand-ins for the right-wing, post-war Chinese Nationalists (it's 1947), though no mention is made of the Communists or Mao or really anything in actual Chinese history around the time of the 'War of Revolution.' The lead human villain does look an awful lot like Chiang Kai-Shek, though. Tom Cruise can be seen waiting in the shadows waiting for the Curse of the Mummy to fall upon him. Not recommended.
The Mummy (1932): adapted by John Balderston from a story by Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer; directed by Karl Freund; starring Boris Karloff (Imhotep) and Zita Johann (Helen Grosvenor): Boris Karloff only appears in full Mummy garb for a few seconds in this Universal horror offering. For much of the film, he's slow-moving but recognizably human, having apparently doffed his bandages during the eleven years that pass between the movie's prologue and main story.
Karloff is Karloff, underplaying so as to instill menace, talking in a sepulchral whisper. Karl Freund's first American film as a director, The Mummy looks terrific in its play with shadows and light. The first Universal Frankenstein movie had made Boris Karloff a big enough star by the time The Mummy was released that the legend 'Karloff!' dominated the posters. And Karloff and the set design are really the stars here -- Karloff's co-stars are a terribly forgettable lot. I've forgotten them already.
Of course, Karloff only appears in full mummy regalia for a couple minutes. For the rest of it, he's sinister but human-looking as the resurrected Egyptian priest Imhotep, mummified alive for the crime of loving the Pharaoh's daughter. But you can't keep a good monster down.
Inspired by stories of the Curse of King Tut's Tomb, The Mummy sends Karloff on a tour of vengeance and love, as he seeks the reincarnation of his lost love. Yes, reincarnation. Not something the Ancient Egyptians were known for believing in, but what the Hell. Who can tell Hinduism from Egyptian mythology?
Karloff is great as Imhotep. In one of his first full speaking roles as a horror star, Karloff seems to intuitively understand something that a lot of early sound actors did not: Less is More on the big screen. He has that great Grinch Karloff voice, and he knows how to use it -- for the most part, insinuatingly, softly. His movements are slow and patient, befitting a 3700-year-old man-mummy. Every time I see Karloff in a movie, major or slight, I'm again impressed by what a natural-seeming, finely tuned screen actor he was. I can pretty much happily watch him in anything. Recommended.
The Mummy (1999): developed by Stephen Sommers, Lloyd Fonvielle, and Kevin Jarre from the 1932 screenplay by John L. Balderston, Nina Wilcox Putnam, and Richard Schayer; directed by Stephen Sommers; starring Brendan Fraser (Rick O'Connell), Rachel Weisz (Evelyn Carnahan), John Hannah (Jonathan Carnahan), Arnold Vosloo (Imhotep/The Mummy), and Oded Fehr (Ardeth Bay): Created for people who found Raiders of the Lost Ark to be too realistic, The Mummy is a perfectly disposable popcorn movie that vanishes almost entirely from the memory after you've watched it. The main cast (Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, and John Hannah) pretty much defines affability.
Arnold Vosloo as the titular character almost seems to have wandered in from a different, better movie. He gives Imhotep, a role that originated back in 1932 with Boris Karloff, some heft and pathos. That he's stuck speaking ancient Egyptian (well, whatever the filmmakers decided that was) for pretty much the whole movie seems like a handicap the film-makers needed to fix. The central visual effects image -- the face in the engulfing sandstorm -- was striking enough to be recycled in The Mummy Returns and in the recent Tom Cruise version of The Mummy (2017). Lightly recommended, especially for kiddies.
The Mummy Returns (2001): developed by Stephen Sommers from the 1932 screenplay by John L. Balderston, Nina Wilcox Putnam, and Richard Schayer; directed by Stephen Sommers; starring Brendan Fraser (Rick O'Connell), Rachel Weisz (Evelyn Carnahan), John Hannah (Jonathan Carnahan), Arnold Vosloo (Imhotep/The Mummy), and Oded Fehr (Ardeth Bay): Not so much scripted as assembled from its predecessor and other sources. Those sources include the then-new computer game Diablo 2. I kid you not.
Stephen Sommers just keeps shoveling as a director and writer, riffing on The Lost World in one scene, Raiders of the Lost Ark in another. He even throws in some gratuitous reincarnation stuff for, um, the sake of character motivation? There's also toilet humour, a precociously annoying boy, a steam-punky home-made dirigible, endless ranks of CGI soldiers, and a horribly rendered CGI Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as the Scorpion King, soon to be spun off into his own movie. Enjoyable, just. Lightly recommended.
The Mummy: adapted by John Balderston from a story by Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer; directed by Karl Freund; starring Boris Karloff (Imhotep) and Zita Johann (Helen Grosvenor) (1932): The first Universal Frankenstein movie had made Boris Karloff a big enough star by the time The Mummy was released that the legend 'Karloff!' dominated the posters. And Karloff and the set design are really the stars here -- Karloff's co-stars are a terribly forgettable lot. I've forgotten them already.
Of course, Karloff only appears in full mummy regalia for a couple minutes. For the rest of it, he's sinister but human-looking as the resurrected Egyptian priest Imhotep, mummified alive for the crime of loving the Pharoah's daughter. But you can't keep a good monster down.
Inspired by stories of the Curse of King Tut's Tomb, The Mummy sends Karloff on a tour of vengeance and love, as he seeks the reincarnation of his lost love. Yes, reincarnation. Not something the Ancient Egyptians were known for believing in, but what the Hell. Who can tell Hinduism from Egyptian mythology? You might as well just worship Hawkman!
Karloff is great as Imhotep. In one of his first full speaking roles as a horror star, Karloff seems to intuitively understand something that a lot of early sound actors did not: Less is More on the big screen. He has that great Grinch Karloff voice, and he knows how to use it -- for the most part, insinuatingly, softly. His movements are slow and patient, befitting a 3700-year-old man-mummy. Every time I see Karloff in a movie, major or slight, I'm again impressed by what a natural-seeming, finely tuned screen actor he was. I can pretty much happily watch him in anything. Recommended.
Lost Angels by David J. Schow collecting the following stories: Red Light; Brass; Pamela's Get; The Falling Man; and Monster Movies (Collected 1990): The horror boom of the 1970's and 1980's helped make the 1980's and early 1990's the Golden Age of horror short-story collection released in mass-market (as opposed to specialty house) paperback. This continues to be something of a boon to this day, as used copies of some of the finest collections in horror history still show up in used bookstores and on-line for purchase in situations where the collections haven't been re-published.
David J. Schow has been immortalized as one of the founders of the Splatterpunk sub-genre of horror that came to prominence over the course of the 1980's. He's a writer of diverse interests, however, and this collection doesn't feature anything in the Splatterpunk genre. Instead, it features four novellas or novelettes that are indeed described in different ways by the collection's title, and a concluding non-horror story that's nonetheless deeply concerned with horror, its history, and those who love it in its many forms.
Overall, Lost Angels is a dynamite collection. Schow sets all the stories in Los Angeles (another reason for the title). The city insinuates itself into every narrative in all its weird, night-bright oddness. Hollywood players, hangers-on, and bystanders populate the stories. Schow integrates the supernatural with this Hollywood Babylon in sinister but sometimes comic ways -- one supernatural being wants its story told on film, for example.
The thematic concerns of the stories firmly place Schow within the legacy of Fritz Leiber. Like Leiber, Schow searches for supernatural situations that fit the contemporary world, or even grow out of it, per Leiber's seminal 1940 story "Smoke Ghost." Indeed, one story here is a brilliant companion to Leiber's "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" -- or an inversion, in some ways.
Aside from that search to create new ghosts and monsters, Schow explores the loneliness of the modern urban and exurban world through romantic and familial relationships, quests through bars and parties and decaying sections of Los Angeles, and keenly observed set-pieces in very specifically imagined locations that include strange, junk-filled warehouses, topless bars for ruthless businessmen, studio offices, and occult shops with sarcastic clerks. Love, identity, and loneliness inform much of this collection. It's not that Nothing Is What It Seems...it's that Some Things That Seem, Aren't. Highly recommended.
Tootsie: written by Larry Gelbart, Murray Schisgal, Don McGuire, Robert Garland, Barry Levinson, and Elaine May; directed by Sydney Pollack; starring Dustin Hoffman (Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels), Jessica Lange (Julie), Teri Garr (Sandy), Dabney Coleman (Ron), Bill Murray (Jeff), Charles Durning (Les), George Gaynes (John Van Horn), Geena Davis (April) and Sidney Pollack (George Fields) (1982): Ah, what a great comedy. The cast is terrific and in fine form in this fable of an actor (Hoffman) who learns to be a better man by pretending to be a woman in order to get a job on a soap opera.
It's really remarkable how zingy the dialogue is throughout, and how uniformly excellent is the cast (including director Pollack as Hoffman's long-suffering agent). The difficulty of working with Hoffman forms a subtext to the entire picture -- Pollack refused to direct him again despite Tootsie's massive critical and commercial success. Bill Murray drifts in and out to provide a loose, improvisational Greek Chorus as Hoffman's playwright-room-mate, Jessica Lange won an Oscar for her sweet, funny performance, and everyone else is also awesome. Highly recommended.
The Mummy: written by Jimmy Sangster; directed by Terence Fisher; starring Peter Cushing (John Banning), Christopher Lee (Kharis the Mummy), and Yvonne Furneaux (Isobel/Ananka) (1959): Enjoyable, atmospheric remake by British Hammer Studios of the original 1930's Universal horror movie The Mummy. This movie completed Christopher Lee's Hammer trifecta of playing three of the four classic horror-movie monsters originally made famous by those Universal movies of the 1930's -- Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, and the Mummy, but alas, no Wolf Man.
Lee hated the heavy make-up and costuming for the Mummy, and would avoid heavy make-up ever afterwards. Like Karloff before him, he towers over the rest of the cast (there's a funny moment in which a drunk English poacher claims that the Mummy is 10-feet tall, and it doesn't seem like that much of an exaggeration). Lee is again teamed with his Dracula and Frankenstein co-star Peter Cushing, here playing the son of the archaeologist who released the vengeful mummy into the world.
The Egyptian sets and costumes are really quite impressive, as are the moody scenes set on the moor and in the swamp nearby, with some nice staging for scenes in which the Mummy emerges from, and later descends into, the swamp. Cushing makes for an interesting hero here as he did in the Dracula films as Van Helsing, and Yvonne Furneaux is lovely in the dual role of Cushing's wife and the long-dead Egyptian priestess Ananka, whom Lee's high priest loved and was ultimately mummified alive for loving.
Lee does what he can with his eyes, the only expressive part his made-up face shows, and by the end achieves a sort of lurching, Frankensteinian pathos as the Mummy. That pathos is also partially obtained by having a cultist give the Mummy his murderous orders. The Mummy really looks like he'd rather not stir from his 4000-years' sleep. Recommended.
