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

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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.

31 Days of Horror: The Mummy (1959)

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I’ve talked about Hammer Horror numerous times in these pages. Their most famous, and arguably their best, films were when they essentially remade the classic Universal Monster Movies (Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy). Hammer updated the filmmaking to 1950-1970s standards, giving them lots more violence and sex appeal, while still keeping the stories interesting and familiar. They made a lot of sequels to the three main monsters, and I’ve seen most of them, but never in order. A few weeks ago I thought it would be fun to actually watch them in order. Unfortunately, I watched the first two (Dracula, The Revenge of Frankenstein) before I decided to start writing again, and it has been too long for me to reasonably be able to talk about them now. So we’ll just begin here.

The Mummy (1932) is my least favorite of the classic Universal Monster Movies (at least of the originals; some of the later sequels are pretty bad.) And so it is with Hammer’s attempt at making a Mummy movie (the only truly good Mummy film is that one with Brendan Fraser from the 1990s).

This one has its moments, but it gets bogged down in a rather dull backstory that completely destroys any momentum the film had going for it. The plot steals most of its details from several of the sequels to the Universal Mummy movie. A couple of archaeologists are searching for the tomb of Egyptian Ananka in 1885. The father finds it and accidentally awakens Kharis (Christopher Lee) the mummified guardian of Ananka. This sends the father into a catatonic state.

He awakens three years later and tells his tale to his son, John Banning (Peter Cushing.) The Mummy will now attack all those who desecrated Ananka’s tomb. But first, an overly long backstory. The film flashes back to tell us about Kharis and his secret relationship with Ananka. Honestly, it isn’t interesting enough to delve into, but the film seems to love it.

Actually, I feel like the costume and set designers worked really hard on this section (and probably spent a lot of money on it), so the filmmakers felt they needed to make all that time and money fill the screen for a while. There is literally a parade where extras in extravagant costumes, carrying ornate props, walk across the screen for several minutes. It completely kills the momentum of the film.

Eventually, we get back to the film proper and get some good Mummy action, and it is there that the film excels. Christopher Lee’s mummy costume looks great. He mostly just moans and walks awkwardly across the screen, so I can’t say much about his acting (he is unmummified in the flashbacks, which might be why that scene is so long – Lee wanted more time on screen unwrapped). Whenever the Mummy gets shot, holes blow right through him. The effect is pretty chilling (though sadly there is no scene like you see on the poster where a light shines straight through.

Peter Cushing is great as always and the scenes where he’s battling it out with the Mummy are the best parts of the movie. The rest of it is rather dull, I’m afraid.

Still, it is definitely worth watching if you are interested in Hammer Horror. But I’d recommend the Dracula films first.

31 Days of Horror: The Mummy’s Hand (1940)

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The Mummy (1932) is probably my least favorite of the classic Universal Horror films. Frankly, it is a bit dull and the Mummy doesn’t have nearly enough screen time. But it does contain some great set work and a wonderful performance from Zita Johann. This is probably why I’ve never bothered with any of the sequels…until now

The Mummy’s Hand takes the worst parts of the original and adds in some corny comic relief. Dick Foran and Wallace Ford, doing their best Abbott and Costello impressions play an archeologist and his trusty sidekick, both down on their luck. A broken vase they buy in an open-air market leads them on an expedition funded by a silly magician (Cecil Kellaway) and his daughter (Peggy Moran).

After a lot of plot, they eventually find the Mummy’s tomb. Some high priest or some-such thing feeds the Mummy some tea leaves and puts him under his control. Or something. My attention was waning at this point.

It isn’t a terrible film. The Mummy’s design is good, and some of the comedy is actually pretty funny. It’s just that the film feels so very slight. Its runtime is just 66 minutes and the Mummy doesn’t show up until about 40 minutes in, so there is a lot of filler. It had a tiny budget and pretty much no one involved with the original had anything to do with this sequel, so you can’t blame it for not being amazing.