Parents' Guide to Lee Cronin's The Mummy

This horror movie certainly delivers on the gore and brutal violence, but it's centered around a half-cooked plot and a batch of characters who rarely seem to be paying attention to what's going on. Lee Cronin's The Mummy—so titled to distinguish itself from Universal's copyrighted franchise—promised more of the intense shocks that Cronin's Evil Dead Rise delivered, and it does that, but it's as if someone forgot to fill in the rest of the blanks. It's pretty clear from the start that Katie isn't going to be nursed back to health with patience and love, especially when she escapes, skitters through the crawlspace like a large crab, and eats a live scorpion. But it takes a good long while before the characters realize this, and viewers are waaay ahead of them.

Reporter/dad Charlie becomes obsessed with finding out what happened and is often away while scary stuff is going on. But that's no excuse, because even when everyone's home, no one seems to notice anything. Plot threads are left dangling left and right as the movie sprawls out to a ridiculous 133 minutes, flipping back and forth between Cairo and the United States. At one point, the only smart character, Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), flies from Cairo to the Cannon home, just to show them a tape she's found. But the real kicker is that Lee Cronin's The Mummy isn't a mummy movie at all; it's a demon movie, and no better than any other demon movie of the past few years. Let's hope there are no sequels planned and that this one is called "a wrap."