Probably the first question you’re compelled to ask is, of course, who’s Lee Cronin? You can smell the gall from here on this new Blumhouse franchise-kindling-stack — really, that Lee Cronin? So now you’ll know, Cronin is merely the Irish genre toiler behind the perfectly mundane horror i ndie The Hole in the Ground (2019) and the latest reflux of the “Evil Dead” franchise (2023); there is actually no earthly reason you should know of his existence. All the Blumhouse marketeers want to do is make us think we missed the brand-making event that has not in fact happened yet, though the syntactically tortured auteur-possessive title move seems pretty strained, hardly William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Andy Warhol’s Dracula, more like Jacqueline Susann’s Once Is Not Enough, though we ask too much to have it make textual sense, like Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams. Also, it’s not really The Mummy; given the genre, Lee Cronin’s A Mummy would be more apt, if idiotic from any perspective. Still, with the resulting film, even the word Mummy is questionable, since the movie is actually a somewhat rote possession-exorcism entry. Which leaves us with no title at all. Blumhouse couldn’t care less — their movies are now their own flavor of Save the Cat! blueprint, and the producers are so aware of their own haunting/possession/evil doll cliches, they’ve stuffed them into the company’s logo credit roll. We do start in Egypt, where an odd family led by a nasty mom (Hayat Kamille, in the credits as “The Magician”) heads to an oasis in the desert where apparently they’re incubating something in a sarcophagus. Things go bad, but soon we’re with an American family in Cairo: the ever-anxious Jack Reynor is a studly TV reporter on assignment and Laia Costa is the cool pregnant wife, with two bickering sub-tween kids already (Dean Allen Williams and Emily Mitchell). Mitchell’s adorable puddin’ head gets kidnapped by Kamille’s witchy weirdo, though for occult reasons, not a quick ransom. Jump ahead eight years, with the bruised family back in Albuquerque sans one daughter but with a new eight-year-old (Billie Roy). Then, a plane crash back in Egypt brings the same sarcophagus to light, with the now-grown missing daughter (Natalie Grace) inside — scarred, twisted, mute, covered with rune-etched bandages, and quite obviously possessed by something. That’s all preamble; the main meat of Mr. Cronin’s opus is the familiar bolero of evil infective influence, telekinetic violence, levitations, vomitings, and plain old assaults, as the family stubbornly tries to deal with their malevolent burden at home and struggles to find out what actually happened to her, by way of an investigation by a dogged Egyptian missing-persons cop (a magnetic May Calamawy). Honestly, all child-possession films, going back to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, can be read as supernatural riffs on what it must be like to have a violent and/or psychotic teenager (and what it’s like to wonder where and when your parental responsibilities can end), and this movie checks that box, however tiresomely. Reynor is especially well-cast, having cornered the market, at least since Midsommar (2019), for alpha dudes stupefied by irrational women. It’s also incidental that the genre smush of Cronin’s script was apparently inspired by the opening of Friedkin’s 1973 movie, in Egypt — Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeill was a mummy! Kinda! Meanwhile, thwack, slash, gak, ptooey, as the possessed girl arches her back unnaturally, scuttles like a crab, and attacks everyone. Most of the ostensible “scares” are just gore-soaked cruelty; unlike Friedkin and his generation, filmmakers like Cronin, Blum, et al., seem to think horror as a genre is all about and only about the infliction of pain and suffering. But funny! — as the family’s grandma (Veronica Falcon) is hanged, catapulted out a second-story window, and then eaten by wolves, we’re smirkily treated to “The Weight,” by The Band, on the soundtrack. Because, cool, right? Her subsequent wake turns into a joke-stained, casket-tumbling debacle, complete with ceiling-crawling possessee, by which point you’re either chuckling feebly or thinking of the burger your 18 bucks might’ve bought instead. The post Review: ‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ is Not Really a Mummy Movie, But Blumhouse Couldn’t Care Less appeared first on LA Weekly. ...read more read less