Trouble Comes to New Mexico in ‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’

No shuffling, bandage-wrapped undead here — not even much Egyptian exotica. From its title to its content, Lee Cronin’s Lee Cronin’s The Mummy makes puzzling hay out of the beloved Universal Pictures franchise that started with Karl Freud’s 1932 eerie cinematic gem, itself rooted in the fascination around the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. But this latest iteration swaps Cairene glamour for Albuquerque body horror, transforming the time-worn story of an ancient civilization’s cursed high priest into a vengeful homewrecker spirit imported from Egypt to America for some down-and-dirty demonic possession.

Title ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: Lee Cronin
Written by: Lee Cronin
Starring: Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, Shylo Molina, Billie Roy, Verónica Falcón, Hayat Kamille, May Elghety
Running time:  133 mins

Katie Cannon (Emily Mitchell) is a happy little 9-year-old living in Cairo with her family, bickering with her brother and learning international morse code for a local kid’s explorer’s club. Unbeknownst to her father Charlie (Jack Reynor) and mother Larissa (Laia Costa), though, a mysterious older woman keeps secretly coming up to the fence in their backyard. She’s been grooming Katie with Tut’s Treasures chocolate bars, and eventually hands her a poisoned nectarine with a scarab hidden inside that promptly crawls out and jumps down Katie’s gullet, temporarily paralyzing her long enough to be kidnapped.

Her devastated parents, after desperately pleading in vain with the local authorities to track down their girl, end up moving back to New Mexico to live with Larissa’s mother Carmen (Verónica Falcón). Until, eight years later, they get an unexpected call from the Cairene police saying that they’ve found their daughter. Only problem is that she’s wizened and catatonic, since she’s been miraculously recovered from inside a 3,000 year old sarcophagus that was found amid the rubble of a plane crash outside of Aswan.

So the elated Charlie and Larissa bring a now 17-year-old Katie (Natalie Grace) home to America, where the married couple, their two other kids Maud (Billie Roy) and Sebastián (Shylo Molina), and Carmen all welcome the intensely creepy kid back into the fold. Except Katie, with her strangely dry, parched skin and wildly overgrown fingernails and toenails, vacillates from being checked out to throwing sudden fits of rage, vomiting in people’s faces and scrambling around the house eating stray scorpions. (Strange that a house has stray scorpions in it, but I guess that’s Albuquerque for you.)

Even worse, the parents realize that Katie’s wrinkled skin is actually covered in thin strips of parchment paper with an ancient anti-demonic protective chant written in hieratic script. Even worse, it’s an Egyptian spirit called the Nasmaranian, known more harrowingly as “the destroyer of families.” And when they remove part of the bandages, the Nasmaranian starts to get loose — and begins to control not just Katie but Sebastián and Maud.

To his credit, and despite oddly putting his possessive in the moniker, not-a-household-name Cronin leans into the material’s terror, jettisoning the family-friendly chills and amusement-park thrills of previous mummy movies, especially Stephen Sommer’s wildly popular 1999 Brendan Fraser Mummy reboot. Instead of reimaging the material, though, he merely plays cinematic graverobber, stealing principally from The Exorcist but also borrowing generously from Hereditary and The Omen, with a dollop of creepy police proceduralism courtesy of Silence of the Lambs and Seven.

The outcome is a clumsily wrapped gross-out fest full of blood, puke, and entrails that (despite all the jump-scares and bombastic peek-a-boos) still manages to invoke a few moments of genuine dread. That said, the premise is inherently rooted in a child’s abduction and torture, and there’s no denying the stomach-churning pungency that comes from sharing ingredients with a pedophilic snuff film — a point highlighted when the parents force themselves to watch videotaped evidence of their daughter being ritually murdered.

There’s also a line where the possessed Katie says to Sebastián, “Baby brother, want to help me get undressed?” and he automatically says “Yes.” So be warned that Lee Cronin’s Lee Cronin’s The Mummy happily dabbles in the language and iconography of child abuse and incest enough to make audiences squirm for all the wrong reasons.

There are a few scenes, though, where the demon conjures such nihilistic mayhem that the film comes alive as a genuine nightmare, including a wake in the family house that has one kid pulling out her teeth and another climbing the ceiling before knocking over an open casket and licking up the embalming fluid from a leaking corpse. This Mummy definitely lets fresh air into a very old property, although its perversions and depravity might be better left unsealed.