MAGACore Mummy

Now Im gonna level with you: I went to see Lee Cronin's The Mummy because I had an afternoon to kill on my book tour, and it was this, Michael (lol yikes nope) or Super Mario Galaxy. While I briefly considered Mario, when you're traveling around the country talking about the extremely reactionary aesthetic and political effects of franchised IP cinema, its hard to make yourself go to the sequel whose only attraction, even in the trailer, is pretty explicitly "all the other Nintendo characters are gonna be there!" I'll take yet another swing at my least favorite Universal Monster 9 times out of 10.

Still, I knew nothing about Lee Cronin's The Mummy beyond seeing its frankly unimpressive trailer before other horror flicks. Walking in I had no idea why writer-director Lee Cronin got the auteur treatment in the title: If forced to guess, I probably would've said it was to differentiate it from the previous disastrous attempt at a Mummy reboot, but a few minutes in I realized it was also for horror sickos like me to recognize that, much like Cronin's previous, Evil Dead Rise, it was gonna be an extreme gory, gross-out, throwbacky movie.

Jokes on them though, because I thought Evil Dead Rise was mediocre, and so I didnt even remember Cronin's name. (Jokes back on me of course because I still ended up the only person in a matinee in Asheville, North Carolina, wondering how I so consistently get myself into scrapes like this.)

Anyway, like Evil Dead Rise, this movie takes a high-concept premise and a decent enough script as a bare frame to hang buckets of gore and extreme set-pieces on, using cynical representational politics to mask extremely regressive politics and to serve a fundamentally misogynistic cultural moment. Bro Horror is back baby!