Day of the Mummy

 *½

Welcome to the cursed earth, Jack.

Sadly, it takes a whole 65 minutes to get to the Pharaoh Mummy, so I’m not particularly endorsing the first killer tomb mummy movie that seems to have come down the pike in a while. At least it isn’t overblown with CGI bugs and Brendan Fraser mimicking Indiana Jones, but Day of the Mummy  doesn’t exactly set off a 4^th of July fireworks display of awesomeness either.

One thing I got pretty tired of after a while was Danny Glover and his demands in Egyptologist/archeologist Jack finding a particular stone. Glover’s face is a constant, showing up in a frame to the lower left hand corner of Jack’s glasses requesting over and over, ad nauseum, a diamond of priceless worth believed to be with the body of a long lost Pharaoh reputed to have finally been discovered by a missing archeologist. I was worn down by Glover’s face and his expectations in Jack acquiring the stone that the film became taxing for me.

Day of the Mummy concerns an expedition to find a Pharaoh. Jack (William MacNamara; Argento fans will know him as a young man that is the lover of the heroine killed while she must watch in “Opera”) is hired by Glover’s wealthy benefactor, Carl, to get a diamond that rests within the chest of the Pharaoh’s skeletal remains. Hired by an archeological crew led by Dr. Cooper (Eric Young), which includes a woman he quickly desires, Kate (Andrea Monier), Jack Wells will be wearing a pair of glasses with a special camera device that allows Carl to see what he does during the expedition. A mini-ear piece to hear Carl is included, so Jack must keep in contact with him during the whole thing much to our dismay.

A majority of the film deals with meeting the crew, the Middle Eastern guide, traveling to the location where the cavernous dwelling of the Pharaoh is, venturing inside it, and ultimately getting trapped/lost in the tunnels, eventually encountering the burial chamber and killer mummy inside. There are also some Egyptian soldiers that cause our crew a bit of a pickle, a cave-in, the guide turning on them in favor of his support for the mummy, and the discovery of the former archeologist who went missing with his remains revealing a missing heart and deteriorated corpse.

The final ten or so minutes may be too little too late, but when we get the mummy he’s rather awesome. Still we get a lot of POV, as this is an experiment in the “found footage” vein where most of what we see is through the glasses of MacNamara. He turns out to be quite a hero as he tries to find a way out for the crew, while all the while looking for the diamond Glover so desperately covets. He cares about their safety even as his mission is secret from them. Kate he builds a care for specifically and she even saves him at one point from certain death. The cavernous tunnels is nicely claustrophobic and scary in that passages often present themselves leaving us to wonder if MacNamara will ever find his way out. Obviously I always figured he would, but the found footage genre (which this emulates) is prone for ending things bleakly.

I just feel like for a majority of the audience watching this (those who just want a fun killer mummy movie) will be sorely disappointed that the film waits so long to turn the mummy loose and when he does get to kill it is all rather underwhelming. So what we are left with is a rather spooky cavern and a rad killer mummy but not much else. Even getting to the cavern seems to take forever, and once inside little but the avalanche happens. The rest is Glover demanding the diamond, MacNamara lusting for Kate, Jack reading hieroglyphics when he isn’t arguing with Cooper, and a poor member of the crew just getting hurt constantly (the guide cuts him up, he gets his arm underpinned thanks to falling rock, and he’s carted off to be killed by the mummy). I wish I could say this was a fine addition to a rather disreputable subgenre that hasn’t seen a good movie in ages (I can only remember a fun segment with Christian Slater in Tales from the Darkside: the Movie featuring a killer mummy and that was quite a while back), but I’d be lying. The current imdb rating is sadly accurate.