The Friday Night Horror Movie: Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026)

image host

The title of this film makes no sense to me. When you think of a movie titled The Mummy, you are most likely thinking of the old Universal pictures with Boris Karloff or the Brendan Fraser films from the 1990s (or if you are a terrible person, you might be thinking of the abomination that starred Tom Cruise a while back.) But those films were all essentially connected. The later films were more or less remakes of the original. They took different slants on the story, but they are all still essentially explorers and archeologists coming across an Egyptian mummy coming to life.

This film is not that. This film is about a little American girl who gets possessed by an Egyptian demon. She is sort of mummy-like. She does get wrapped in strips of gauze or whatever, but it is nothing like those previous films. So, why call it The Mummy? I kind of get why they added Lee Cronin to the front ot the title, that helps differentiate it from the other Mummy films. I have to admit, when I first saw it, I thought, who the heck is Lee Cronin?

I don’t think he’s an incredibly well-known name. He’s probably best known for directing The Evil Dead Rise. That makes sense because this Mummy film has more in common with those new Evil Dead movies than any of the other Mummy films. Which brings me back to why they named it The Mummy in the first place. According to Wikipedia, Jason Blumhouse approached Lee Cronin with the idea of remaking The Mummy. He wasn’t too keen on it, but then sat down and wrote a much more horror-inflected film. They call that a re-imagining, but really, I’d still say this has little in common with the other films. My guess is that this is more of a marketing scheme than anything else. People have heard of The Mummy and everything, it seems, has to be connected to some earlier IP anymore.

None of this really matters, of course. What matters is whether this film is any good. My answer, sadly, is not really. It works best as a mystery and family drama, but when it moves into gore-filled horror (which is large chunks of the film, especially towards the end), I lost interest.

Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is an American TV journalist living in Cairo with his pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), and their two children, Katie (Natalie Grace) and Sebastian (Shylo Molina). On the day he learns that he has been offered a job he very much wants in New York, Katie gets kidnapped. The police are no help. Despite evidence that she might have been groomed (someone was secretly giving her candy), they point the suspicion back at the family.

Fast forward eight years, and the family is living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with Larissa’s mother, Carmen Santiago (Verónica Falcón). Katie is still missing, but Larissa did have her baby, now a young girl, Maud (Billie Roy).

A plane crashes in Aswan, Egypt. Inside is a giant sarcophagus. Inside that, they find Katie wrapped in the stuff they wrap mummies in. She’s alive and has been taken to the hospital. Despite the fact that she is either unable or refuses to speak, has clear signs of abuse and self-harm, and has had to be sedated, the doctors clear her to fly home, and there the Cannons decide to just keep her at home. They refuse to take her to a local hospital or get her any sort of mental help, even when she begins acting even more erratically and terrifyingly.

Honestly, I had a hard time getting past this stupidity. The poor girl clearly needed help, and the family continually refused to give her any. They were all a bit in shock, and certainly the parents felt guilty for losing her that day. The mom is also a nurse, so she has some medical training, but that should have made her even more aware that Katie needed help.

But this is a horror movie, and we need our jump scares. When I could push that complaint away, I was able to enjoy parts of the film. The dad starts talking to one of the Cairo detectives (May Calamawy), and they slowly piece together what happened to Katie. This part of the film was the most interesting. I mean, the actual answers are horror movie nonsense, but it kept me tuned in.

But the film is more interested in gross-out violence. There are strong hints of The Exorcist and The Evil Dead throughout the film. Katie is possessed by evil. She talks in a satanic voice. She does crazy stuff. She possesses the other kids. There is vomiting and blood, and all sorts of goo. It is all done in a way that I found uninteresting. Maybe I’m just getting too old for that stuff, or maybe it just wasn’t done all that well. I dunno.

But hey, it was still better than that Tom Cruise film.

The Movie Journal: June 2026

imgbox

I watched 36 movies in June. 16 of them were made before I was born. 30 of them were new to me. There was no theme this month.

As I’m writing this and adding links to all the reviews I’ve written, I realize I haven’t written as much as I used to. A couple of months back, I made a decision that I wanted to write more about music on this site since this was a music-only site for many years, and some of you have told me you don’t have much interest in movies. Once that decision was made, it was like a little button was pushed in my brain, turning off that demand to write about movies. 

Before that decision was made, I always felt like I needed to write something nearly every day. Movies were the easiest thing to write about since I watch a lot of them.  Having a theme each month also demanded a certain amount of writing. But I clicked that switch, and that feeling of “needing” to write about movies died. I actually do want to write more than I have, but once that button was switched, I immediately found other things to distract me with.  It’s weird.

And yet, the switch to write about music hasn’t quite been turned on either. I do my main music listening in my car, mostly when driving to and from work. I’ve been trying to write about concerts, but they last a couple of hours. My ride to work is about twenty minutes, so it takes me a couple of three days to get a full concert listened to.  Then I want to listen to it a few times before I write anything.  But also, I feel like I need to really listen, and sometimes I’ve got something on my mind.  If I find I’m not really listening, I turn it off. Or sometimes I get a phone call while driving, or something else comes up. So, my music writing takes a lot longer than my movie writing.  I’m working on a better system.

I am still writing about movies, just for Cinema Sentries. So that’s good.

I subscribe to a few different movie streaming services.  We have Prime pretty much always, but we switch back and forth between various others. I usually subscribe to the Criterion Channel, and my wife loves BritBox.  My daughter has recently gotten into anime, so now we have Crunchyroll.  But sometimes we’ll cancel one service and get another one for a month or two. Earlier this year, my daughter really wanted to watch Hamilton, so we subscribed to Disney+ for a month.

Most streaming services offer up pretty good deals on the regular, and I’ve always got my eye out. This month, I got a good deal on the Kino channel and something called Midnight Pulp. Kino is connected to Kino Lorber, a company I get a lot of review Blu-rays from. They have a very nice selection of old movies, and a lot of foreign films. They are similar to Criterion, but whereas Criterion aims for the greatest films ever made, Kino tends to get slightly more obscure films. So I got to watch films like Picpus – a pretty good Maigret film – and A Pain in the Ass – a very funny French film.  

Midnight Pulp is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. They offer up genre films. The time of movies you’d catch at some old midnight movie place, or at the back of your local video store (when there used to be video stores.) They have some terrible films, and a lot of goofy-looking erotica, but I managed to see a terrific Japanese film called Samurai Wolf and Night of the Juggler, which was just wonderful. 

We are at the halfway point of 2026, so I’ll offer up some more statistics. I’ve watched 241 movies this year. I’ve seen 13 films from this year. Dramas are my biggest watched genre, followed by Thrillers, Crime, Action, and Horror. Movies made in the USA got the most views by me followed by the UK, France, Italy, and Japan. 187 or 77 percent of the films I watched were new to me.

imgbox

The big news in the most-watched actors field is that Lino Ventura bounced up to a tie in first place with Tom Baker, Spencer Tracy, and James Stewart (who also moved up one film). Marcel Bozuffie also moved up one film to five. But pretty much everyone else stayed the same.

imgbox

As for directors, Guy Hamilton bumped up a film to three watched, making him tied with a bunch of others for second place. Chloe Zhao is now on the leaderboard, making her the only woman director to place. I should do better about that.

It has been a good year so far. I’ve watched some great movies. Here’s to another six months.

Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) ****1/2
Back to the Wall (1958) ****
Speaking of Murder (1957) ***1/2
Obsession (2025) ***1/2
Dead Heat (1988) ***1/2
Supergirl (1984) ***
Rings of Fear (1978) ***
Fright Night Part 2 (1988) ***1/2
Head Against the Wall (1959) ***
Suicide Club (2001) ***
A Pain in the Ass (1973) ****
Samurai Wolf (1966) ****1/2
Night of the Juggler (1980) ****1/2
Picpus (1943) ***1/2
Virtuosity (1995) ***
Doctor Who: The Awakening (1984) ***1/2
The Toxic Avenger (2023) ***
The Narrow Margin (1952) ****
The Mastermind (2025) ****
Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans (1987) **
Solo (1970) ****
Waves of Lust (1975) **
Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) *****
The Long Arm (1956) ****
The Intruder (1953) ***1/2
Home at Seven (1952) ***
Fright Night (1985) ***1/2
Aesthetics of a Bullet (1973) **
Deathstalker (1983) **
The Roaring Twenties (1939) ****
A View to a Kill (1985) ***1/2
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) ****1/2
Project Hail Mary (2026) ****
Beyond the Door III (1989) ****
Witchboard (1986) *
Backrooms (2026) **1/2

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Fright Night, Part II (1988)

image host

Three years after the events of Fright Night, Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) is in therapy, trying desperately to forget how his neighbor turned out to be a vampire and that he teamed up with former actor and now TV host Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall) to destroy him. Or, if not forget, at least believe that the vampire wasn’t a vampire but rather a serial killer, and the trauma of those events caused him to imagine a supernatural evil.

Charley’s now in college, and he’s got a new girlfriend, Alex (Traci Lind.) One day after therapy, he spies several people entering his apartment complex carrying coffins. There is a similar scene in the first film. The plot of this sequel pretty much follows the same pattern as the first movie. Charley sees some spooky stuff and doesn’t believe it. Then he sees something he has to believe and tries to convince his friends. They don’t believe it until they are face to face with evil. Then they destroy the evil.

The script in this one isn’t as tight. It is a lot sillier and funnier, but the plot is a bit of a mess. There are four villains this time: two vampires, a werewolf, and a guy that eats bugs.  He might be a vampire too, or maybe something else. Mostly he eats bugs and looks menacing (he’s played by Brian Thompson, so he’s good at looking menacing).  The main vamp is Regine (Julie Carmen), and she uses her sexy vampire powers to seduce Charley. She’s ultimately going to turn him into a vamp so that she can torture him for all eternity for what he did to the vampire in the first film who was her brother.

Much like the first film, Charley mostly ignores his girlfriend while at the same time constantly begging her forgiveness. The werewolf takes advantage of this, swooping in on her when Charley has stood her up. He makes a few attempts at wooing her (and after each attempt, the eating guy tells him he was supposed to rip her throat out.)

The villains are more goofy than terrifying. There is one scene where they go bowling for some reason. It turns into a musical montage with them goofing around. One guy scoots one girl down the lanes; another one bowls with one ball in each hand. It ends with the owner’s head coming up the lane chute. It is more fun than I’m making it sound.


Eventually our heroes will have a showdown with the villains. It is pretty good, but not really all that memorable. The whole film is like that. I enjoyed myself, but it will probably be another 15 years before I have any desire to return to it.










Show Review: Bob Dylan and the Band – Oakland, CA (02/11/74)

image host

Furthering my attempts to add more music discussion at The Midnight Cafe, I thought I’d add to my reviews of officially released live music by reviewing some unofficially released tunes as well. That’s maybe slightly a falsehood in this case, as Dylan has released all of these shows in a magnificent boxed set, but he left out all The Band’s solo performances. And this review is not of the officially released discs but of a ROIO.  

Some time ago on my music blog I posted a Bob Dylan and The Band show from 1974, or maybe it was a compilation. I don’t remember.  It doesn’t matter. The point is, I posted something from their tour together at that time, and I made a comment about how it was one of the greatest tours ever.  The thing is I didn’t really know that to be true. I hadn’t really listened to much of that tour. I don’t think I’d even listened to Before the Flood all the way through. But I knew it was a big tour that played big venues to big crowds. I knew people were excited about it because this was the first tour after Bob Dylan’s long hiatus and that while The Band had toured with him in the 1960s, they were now a major rock and roll act in their own right.

Sometime after I posted my unrealized praise, I came to realize that quite a few hardcore Dylanheads weren’t really down with this tour. In fact, many downright loathe it. Turns out Dylan and at least some members of The Band felt it was a sellout tour, good for the pocketbook, but not for the soul. So I thought it would be fun for this, my first bootleg review in a long time to tackle a show from this tour.

I randomly picked this performance and this particular source. Dylan and the Band played some 40 gigs over the course of about two months (often playing two shows per day). This show was towards the end of the tour. They’d play three more gigs in Los Angeles after that, and then they were done. Lossless Bob lists some fourteen sources for this show. I have five of them. I chose LB-4455 to listen to. It is a nice sounding soundboard recording. Oddly, it contains parts of the early show and parts of the late show. The set lists were identical (or nearly so) and this bootleg basically cuts it in half. The split occurs in the middle of the Dylan solo acoustic set.

The tour changed a little bit from the early shows to the end of the tour but by this point they were playing mostly the same songs every night. It broke down like this: Dylan and The Band performed together, then The Band would play some of their songs without Dylan. The Band would leave and Dylan would do a few solo acoustic numbers. Then he’d leave again, allowing The Band to play a few more of their tunes, followed by Dylan being backed by The Band.

After listening to this performance a few times, I can definitely see where the hate is coming from, but also feel that it is overblown. This performance is a big rock and roll show. It is loud and brash, rowdy and racous. It is a big stadium rock and roll show. That’s great for bands like The Rolling Stones, but one usually expects something different from Bob Dylan. His music is suited for a more intimate setting where you can get more nuance. 

But often, it actually works. It starts with a rambunctious “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine).” The music is played loud and fast, Dylan practically spits his words out. I dig it.  It is a powerful way to start the show. This is followed by “Lay Lady Lay”, which is a little more laid back but still rowdy. The song is meant as a seduction, but any girl listening to this would likely run for her life. Garth Hudson is playing some kind of new electric piano. It sounds like an organ here. Or maybe it is an actual organ. I’m terrible at figuring out who is playing what instrument.

I’m not going to do a song by song review. I just don’t have that much to say. I’ll try to list the highlights and maybe anything that seems weird or bad.

“Rainy Day Women” has a carnival feel which really works for the song. “It Ain’t Me, Babe” hangs onto that carnival sound. There are some droning organ chords which I kind of dig, but I can see how it might drive some folks nuts.  Then the piano kicks in and it sounds great. Ditto Robbie Robertson’s guitar playing.  The guitars get loud and rocking during “King Harvest.”

Here’s where I admit I’m not actually a huge fan of The Band. They were all incredibly talented musicians and great live performers. I freaking love The Last Waltz, but a lot of their songs just don’t do it for me. I’ve never been able to “get” Music From the Big Pink. I’ve got numerous recordings of their concerts without Bob and while the performances are often good, I can rarely get into them because of the songs.

I do love “Up on Cripple Creek” but, unfortunately, it cuts out on this recording.  “All Along The Watchtower” which brings Dylan back in with The Band cuts in. Dylan’s solo acoustic songs are fine. I love these songs and he performs them well. But this isn’t Dylan in the 1960s. The nuance and fire is gone.  

“Ballad of Hollis Brown” with The Band is terrific. It is not a favorite song of mine, but this version is fantastic. Great keyboard work, terrific guitar lines. “The Weight” is another song I do love from The Band is it is played with great enthusiasm here. Enthusiasm is a good word for the rest of the songs on this set. The last few songs are played with high energy.

So, yeah, this is good stuff.  It is a big rock and roll concert played with verve. But it does feel like maybe something is missing. It has to be weird playing in front of 20,000 people all cheering and shouting. That personal connection is going to get lost. Nuance and subtlety are hard to find in a massive arena. I look forward to listening to other shows on this tour, but I probably won’t do that for a while.  It is easy to see why Dylan completely deconstructed his concerts the next year with The Rolling Thunder group. But I’m also glad he did something like this.

You can view the entire setlist with notes about this recording here.

I’m not sure how I want to post this sort of thing. I had initally thought I’d upload all the images and text files (but not the music – if you want that send me a message and I can point you in the right direction.) But that seems like a hassle and maybe not that interesting to anyone. So, I’ll ask. Would anyone be interested in seeing that sort of thing? Would you like to have all the source information, just not the music? Is that worth it? Leave me a comment if you have thoughts on this, or anything else.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Toxic Avenger (2025)

image host

When I was a teenager the USA network had a show called Up All Night that ran on Friday and Saturday evenings.  They shows movies all night long. It was hosted by Rhonda Shear (Friday nights) and Gilbert Gottfried (Saturday nights). Rhonda did the whole hot blonde bimbo thing and Gottfried, well he basically just did his usual schtick. The movies were usually dumb comedies or horror films; they were almost always of the b-variety. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized a great many of the films were produced by Troma Entertainment.

Troma specialized in low-budget, self-aware fare that always seem to wink at the audience, letting you know they knew their movies were stupid. I loved that stuff as a teenager, but now I find it insufferable. I like low-budget movies. I can even dig the so bad it’s good genre of films. But the thing for me about that is that the films have be aiming for something good. It needs to have attempted to be a good movie and failed spectacularly. That’s what makes it fun. When  a movie knowingly tries to be stupid in order to fall into the so bad its good category it just annoys me. Troma often falls into that category.

Admittedly, I say that as someone who hasn’t watched a Troma film in decades. I don’t really know what they’ve been doing since the 1990s. Maybe they got good. I doubt that, but maybe my memory of what they used to do has gotten washed.

Troma’s flagship film was The Toxic Avenger (1984). The main character became their mascot of sorts and there were numerous sequels and various other multi-media projects based around it. It is about a nerdy pipsqueek of a teenager who gets ruthlessly picked on. One day he falls into some toxic sludge becoming a mutant with super strength. He then wreaks ultra-violent vengeance upon his enemies. I watched the first one when I was a teenager and enjoyed it, but I haven’t seen the sequels.

When I heard they were doing a remake I was immediately on board. When it came out on Blu-ray I made it my pick of the week. As I note in that article I wouldn’t actually be interested in the film except that it was written and directed by Macon Blair. He’s an actor and director I really enjoy and I’m always excited to see one of his films.  Watching him play around in the Troma sandbox sounded interesting.

The film is pretty much what you would expect from that pairing. Blair is a big fan of the studio and is happy to dive into their mix of goopy violence and goofy comedy. But he’s also too good of a filmmaker to make this truly dumb. He’s also cool enough to get actors like Peter Dinklage, Elijah Wood, and Kevin Bacon to star in it.

Even so it had difficulties getting made. It bounced around for a while in pre-production with several different names attached (Arnold Scwarzenneger was even slated to star at some point) and then once it was made it took forever for it to find any sort of release.

Dinklage is Winston Gooze a down-on-his luck janitor who works for a giant, corrupt pharmaceutical company. It is the kid of place that sells nonsense drugs that are suppossed to heal what ails ya, but really just gives you cancer. They also dump all sorts of toxic sludge into the river.  He’s got terminal cancer and a step-son whose mother recently died of cancer herself.

His insurance won’t cover the medical costs of curing his cancer, and one day he goes to the CEO of the company, Bob Garbinger (a wonderfully unhinged Kevin Bacon) for help. He acts nice, says he’ll help, but then has him escorted out of the building, where he’s greeting by some thugs who throw him into toxic sludge.  Yada Yada, Winston is now the Toxic Avenger and he gets his revenge. 

Blair makes this extremely violent with some truly creative and blood-soaked deaths. But the vibe is goofy so it feels more wild and crazy than truly horrific. Elijah Wood plays Garbinger’s younger brother and he’s made up like Danny DeVito in that Tim Burton Batman movie. He’s having the time of his life.

The whole thing is super goofy. I couldn’t quite get into its wavelength, but again Blair is a good enough filmmaker, and there was a bigger budget with this thing than I expect Troma has ever had before, so it looks good. More or less.

I suspect if you love Troma than this will probably work for you (unless you feel it is a little too “good” for their kind of film). If you have no idea what Troma is, and don’t generally like goopy horror films (even if they are super goofy) then I’d stay way. For me, I’m glad I watched it, but I can’t say I’ll ever do it again.

Day of the Dead is the Pick of the Week

image host

I’ve been debating for days whether or not I should purchase this week’s pick. I’m obviously a physical media collector. I have well over a thousand DVDs, Blu-rays, and UHD discs. I especially like collector’s editions with cool covers, posters, lobby cards, and other collectibles, plus all sorts of in-disc extras.  But there is also a practical side to me. That part wonders why in the world I’d pay $40 for a single movie. A movie I could easily watch for less.  Is a cool cover and some lobby cards really worth that much? Of course, there is also the UHD aspect, and that’s something.

Still debating it.  But it is a fantastic looking set which is why it is my pick. You can read all about it and more over at Cinema Sentries.

Waves of Lust (1975)

image host

I don’t know why I still watch exploitation movies. I know why I used to watch them – they are filled with exciting action, violence, and naked flesh, but I can get that anywhere now. Certainly in ways that are far better produced and more interesting than what appears in most exploitation flicks.  But when an offer for a film called Waves of Lust appears to me, I immediately say “yes.” 

I guess I’ll always be a sucker for this stuff. You can read my review of the film (which isn’t bad, actually) over at Cinema Sentries.

Solo (1970)

image host

One day I may stop singing the praises of Radiance Films, but today is not that day. I love, love, love the way they keep bringing to my attention films that I’d otherwise never hear of in nice sets, loaded with extras.

Solo is a terrific little French thriller about a couple of young revolutionaries in over their heads and how a jewel thief winds up lending them a hand.  You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.