The First Power and the Perplexing Enigma of Action-Horror

 

The First Power (1990)

Dir. and written by David Resnikoff

Starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Tracy Griffith, Jeff Kober

 

Ah, here we have a rare thing, an entry into the action-horror canon. That small body of films that attempt the unlikely feat of melding together two great but very different genre film traditions: action, with its badass protagonists, gun battles, car chases and explosions, and horror, with its ghoulies, ghosties, Chuckys, Amityvilles, and things that go “bump” in the night. In theory, of course, there is at least some crossover here; the visceral threat of bodily destruction, a shared bent towards simmering, adrenaline-pumping tension, perhaps a shared sense of a brittle, bipartite moral universe built around a struggle between good and evil. But while there might be some superficial similarities, I think the preponderance of the experimental evidence suggests that there are some fundamental differences between the mechanics of these two genres, which more often than not render any attempt to combine them a confused and self-defeating affair. It will probably not surprise you terribly to learn that 1990’s THE FIRST POWER does not buck that trend, though it has its charms nonetheless. Still, it will serve nicely as an entrée by which to consider the ways that these two venerable genres interact, and to try and parse why they have more often glanced off each other than successfully melded.

Specifically, I think the way that both genres tend to revolve around power makes them fundamentally incompatible. For the most part, Action movies offer a power fantasy; at their most archetypal, they’re about a rivalry between a lone man –much more rarely a woman—and another party (usually a rival man or group of men), pitted against each other in a battle for control. Whether a scrappy underdog like Bruce in DIE HARD, or an unstoppable Ubermensch like Seagal in OUT FOR JUSTICE (and all his other movies), the fundamental structure is the same: to invite the audience to indulge in the fantasy of being just too God Damn Tough to push around. Exactly what is being contested is mostly unimportant; though our hero may use the language of morality and justice, it’s the challenge itself that powers the story. Most of us spend most of our lives, starting as children, getting pushed around and frustrated by factors beyond our control – bosses, petty bullies, the government, the economy, what have you—so it’s little wonder that this kind of empowerment fantasy is appealing. What if you just didn’t have to take their shit? Man, wouldn’t it be great to be so badass you could just strut around, live by your own rules, teach the bullies of the world a lesson they won’t soon forget?

Horror, on the other hand, inverts the power dynamic. Fear is about a loss of control – about being up against unstoppable, perhaps incomprehensible forces that threaten, pollute, transmogrify the safe and familiar into something threatening and alien. Though the protagonist of a horror movie might –might—get the upper hand in the end, they’re still going to spend most of the runtime in dire peril, often barely able to understand, let alone effectively oppose, the danger facing them. In perhaps the most elemental horror setup, the only thing to do may be to run – to acknowledge that your only hope is to try to escape a force too powerful to even attempt to defend against. Even when a “final girl” prevails over a Jason or a Freddy in the end --in effect regaining the control and personal autonomy that has been denied during her travails-- there’s likely to be a final stinger (Jason suddenly leaping out of the water, say) which snatches back that hard-earned empowerment and suggests that her restored sense of control is only temporary and illusory, a delusional vanity in the face of a chaotic universe which can arbitrarily crush you at any moment.

Consequently, the basic storytelling formulas which define these two genres seem mutually incompatible. A movie can’t be simultaneously a power fantasy and about loss of control, and so maybe it shouldn’t be exactly shocking that there are so few illustrative examples for us to consider. Or, anyway, few examples which are genuinely both. It’s not incredibly unusual to have an action movie with some horror elements in it – the BLADE or UNDERWORLD movies, for example, are clearly structured as action movies but feature strong horror elements. Likewise the RESIDENT EVIL movies, GHOSTS OF MARS, COBRA, THE MUMMY (2017), PRIEST, that sort of thing. You could call those “horror movies” because they have zombies or vampires or what have you, but they’re all clearly build on an action framework, they simply have villains who are slightly more outré than your typical bad guys.

 Conversely, I’d argue there are some horror movies --or at least borderline horror movies— which don’t utilize traditional horror conceits, and lean towards horror entirely through tone and structure; THE RAID, for example, which despite being basically nothing but wall-to-wall fighting, works up such a sense of hopeless, faceless persecution, and is so unremittingly bleak in its presentation, that at least referencing horror seems essential to properly describing the experience. Likewise ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, or GREEN ROOM. All feature purely human antagonists and setups which could reasonably be construed as action movies – is GREEN ROOM really all that different a scenario than DIE HARD?—but crucially, the impetus is on the protagonists’ lack of control of the situation; even if they prevail in the end, there’s no sense of conquering triumph; they limp away, exhausted, broken, just glad to somehow be alive. Their journeys are harrowing rather than exciting; the word “victory” does not suggest itself so much as “survival,” augmented by a pronounced emphasis on the grotesque, gruesome nature of the violence.

Though both genres feature violence, they use it differently, trying to provoke different reactions. One prompts you to cover your eyes, the other to pump your fist – even though the violence itself may be virtually identical. And violence is not the only shared content. Horror movies are not above the louche pleasures of a huge fiery explosion, or a leering, horny sex scene for that matter, but the context is going to be entirely different than in an action film. The sex scene in a horror movie is not evidence of our hero’s awesome virality (as it would be in an action film), but of the profound physical vulnerability we expose ourselves to when we’re naked and unaware.

The difference, I suppose, is one of framing – the way the story encourages us to interpret and emotionally invest in the many genre elements which could be (and often are) common to both genres. And power –or control, if you prefer-- is, I think, at the center of those contrasting framings: whether the lead is ultimately empowered or disempowered for most of the story. There is an explicitly gendered reading of this; it’s no coincidence that Action films tend towards male protagonists, while Horror features a preponderance of women. Tough guys, final girls. Rightly or wrongly, there is the assumption that audiences will perceive women as more inherently vulnerable, and less able to control a situation than a man -- a potentially disruptive problem for an action movie, but an obvious advantage for horror. The Italian Gialli and Poliziotteschi genres (one universally regarded as Horror, the other leaning heavily towards Action), for instance, often have a tremendous overlap in terms of content and in pedigree; the defining difference is located in the nature of the protagonist, which in the case of a Giallo is very likely to be female, and in particular a woman with very little inherent control over her situation, a vulnerable, youthful outsider who doesn’t fully grasp the nuances and mechanics of the world she’s entering. By contrast, the protagonist of a Poliziottesco is nearly always male, and almost by definition a powerful male of some stripe, usually a square-jawed cop or a canny tough guy – someone confident, used to being in-control; indeed, I think one may say without lapsing into arbitrary Freudianism that this protagonist may implicitly consider the actions of the antagonist a direct challenge to his assertive masculinity. There are, needless to say, plentiful exceptions to these trends, but the trends themselves –and their underlying narrative logic—seem to me both inescapable and nakedly revealing about the underlying mechanics behind the two respective genres.*

Poliziottescho vs Giallo

The two approaches are, in a word, incompatible. With all that in mind, then, let us consider the strange and disruptive subset of films which directly mash together key elements of each genre in ways which might be provocative… or merely wrong-headed. A key strand of such films (including our subject for today, THE FIRST POWER) breaks a usually hard-and-fast barrier between action and horror films by inserting a tough guy protagonist into a story which would typically feature a more vulnerable lead. Specimens of this particular sub-subgenre are not abundant, but they do exist. An illustrative example would be 10 TO MIDNIGHT, which features the imperturbably tough Charles Bronson going up against some smarmy, perverted serial killer. You could argue it’s more Crime flick than Action or Horror, but serial killers are a staple of horror, and the strangeness of the central matchup paints a clear picture of the unusual mechanics at work here: the sleazy nudist killer is no match for Bronson’s laconic masculinity; he’s soft, weak, boyish, sexually frustrated. Sending Charles Fucking Bronson after this pathetic narcissist seems almost like a waste, the two combatants are so wildly incommensurate. But the killer is clever enough to hide behind the power of the law, effectively making it impossible for Bronson to stop him, and turning what would typically be a mano a mano fight for supremacy into a grueling exercise in frustration. It sort of works, fueled entirely by our simmering rage at this despicable sadist, but I think it’s noteworthy that is does so in spite of generally undercutting both the strength of the tough guy hero and the unknowable, anxious menace typical of the serial killer genre.

And other, similar movies have tended to fare much worse; Seagal’s two bouts with serial killers in THE GLIMMER MAN and KILL SWITCH waste the juggernaut-like wrath of his on-screen persona on drab, barely-articulated clichés that don’t benefit from the kind of overkill he provides (plus everything else terrible about those two movies); the synopsis for Stallone’s COBRA reads like a horror movie, with its conspiracy of satanic serial killers, but it cranks them (and everything else) up so much they might as well be comic book supervillains, more or less losing all but the most vestigial bits of Horror in the process. SILENT RAGE, which in theory pits Chuck Norris against an undead slasher, seems more aware of the potential incompatibility of these two competing forces, but resolves the dilemma simply by dodging it: Norris and the undead killer meet up only in the film’s climax, and otherwise their two subplots are connected in only the most tangential way.

Perhaps the most interesting attempt to unnaturally graft tough guy cinema onto a horror structure would be PREDATOR. It has, in fact, something like a PSYCHO-style bit of brazen misdirection to it: though the first thing we see is a mysterious spaceship, the movie pretends for a surprisingly long time that it’s some kind of men-on-a-mission jungle action tale, even indulging in a huge gun battle setpiece before gradually teasing out the truth: it is actually a FRIDAY THE 13th-style slasher, where our cast is going to be picked off one by one by a mysterious, unstoppable killer. But in this case, that killer is a superpowered alien, and the horny teens are 'roided-up supersoldiers. This is, at least, a provocative substitution: the movie operates by the standard slasher playbook, but ups the ante by stacking the cast with testosterone-addled musclemen who we don't expect to see so vulnerable and powerless against their tormenter. An interesting idea, maybe, but not one which ends up being very productive in practice, at least as a genre experiment. The characters are so cartoonish and one-dimensional that shifting them to this unfamiliar context doesn't really bring anything interesting out in them; mostly, they just respond to being threatened by becoming even more macho, which sort of undercuts the sense of menace the movie seems to be trying to build. All that outrageously hyper-concentrated machismo is simply more potent than the horror trappings, tilting the balance so decisively that I doubt almost anyone thinks of PREDATOR as a horror film, despite the many specific elements of horror in its structure and execution that you might be able to identify. For proof of that, just look at the sequels; with the arguable exception of PREDATOR 2, they all lean hard on action cliches, adopting the structure of tough guy movies, not single-location slashers.

The problem that all these movies encounter, essentially, is that the fantasy of the tough guy has to do with his effectiveness. An action hero may face setbacks, but ultimately it’s about winning, about individual skill, gumption, and pure raw power overcoming seemingly impossible odds. By definition, the hero needs to be able to take action, to consistently strike back at his antagonists. And of course, the structure of a typical horror film demands exactly the opposite: a protagonist who is outmatched, out of control, oppressed, without any obvious recourse. A hero who can effectively contest his plight, even if facing very long odds, has at least the comfort of purpose, with its accompanying sense of autonomy. It’s when we are directionless, utterly out of control, that we begin to feel fear. It’s why ALIEN is a horror movie, and ALIENS is an action movie. The threat is the same, but once the humans have shown they are capable of fighting back (even with very long odds), the entire dynamic changes.

Except when it doesn’t. Which brings us, at long last, to THE FIRST POWER, a very strange and possibly completely unique movie which simply rams a tough guy cop flick into a supernatural killer flick and refuses to notice that they are working at cross-purposes.

Before we talk about that, though, let’s pause and set the stage. THE FIRST POWER presents us with Lou "The Rough" Diamond Phillips (his Wikipedia page claims he has an uncredited cameo in DEMON WIND?!) as tough guy cop Russ Logan, squaring off against a supernatural serial killer who just won't stay dead. In that sense, a lot like SILENT RAGE, except the gimmick here is that the killer (reliable character actor Jeff Kober, dripping smarmy menace), having been liberated from his body by the overzealous LDP early in the proceedings, is now some kind of evil spirit capable of possessing others to continue his murderous rampage, more like THE FALLEN.

He can do this because he has, you see, "The First Power." What the heck does that mean? I'll let Conspiracy Nun Sister Marguerite (Elizabeth Arlen**, NATIONAL LAMPOON'S EUROPEAN VACATION) explain:

 

SISTER MARGEURITE: There are three powers that can be bestowed by God or Satan. The Third Power is the ability to take over another person's body. Your friend [Tracy Griffith, SLEEPAWAY CAP III: TEENAGE WASTELAND] is a psychic, she has the Second Power: the gift of knowing the future. The First Power is resurrection. Immortality.

 

DETECTIVE RUSS LOGAN: Look sister, I don't understand these things.

 

SISTER MARGEURITE: There's just one way [to defeat the killer]... Through the only soul in history who had all three powers!***

 

[holds out a crucifix, to LDP's obvious disappointment. Then she pulls a knife out of it!] Woah! ‘Brother Maynard, bring out the holy shank of Antioch!’ I’m honestly not sure if this knife was built specifically for killin’ First-Power-havin’ sumnabitches, or she just assumes because of the crucifix it’ll have a little extra kick, but I appreciate this nun’s moxie. Also based on her description it seems like this movie would be more accurately titled THE FIRST AND THIRD POWER AND ANOTHER LADY WITH THE SECOND POWER, but admittedly I guess there would be no problem if this particular guy didn’t have the First one.

(I never heard any of this in Catholic school, by the way, but to be fair Sister Marguerite claims that "the church doesn't allow us to discuss [the First Power]" so I guess you have to be hip to some religious secrets? In fact, the whole thing actually opens with a bunch of old Church Authority types [including David Gale from RE-ANIMATOR!] fretting, “Sister, this is the 20th century… so one mustn’t mention Satan in polite company.” I guess they must not have considered my first-grade Catholic School religion class to be “polite company,” because I recollect they did mention Satan quite a bit, exactly in 1990. My memory is that they also very much do allow, and in fact encourage and even require quite a bit of discission of resurrection, but I guess I'm gonna have to trust THE FIRST POWER to have done its research.)

 

Anyway, the movie has a long way to go before it gets into the dense theological weeds of crucifixes which double as knives, BBQ tongs, beveling hammers, etc. In fact, it’s a very long time before our protagonist is even willing to admit that more exotic methods may be required, although he is, I feel, much slower on the uptake than you or I would be. It turns out that the problem with being a tough-guy detective who is absolutely capable of smoking a cigarette while wearing a trench coat and aviators is that while you may be great at catching criminals (and in fact, it seems like he is; we hear via a news report that “this is the third time in less than five years that Logan has been responsible for the death or capture of a serial killer.” This shit’s getting pretty routine for him!) that does not necessarily make you the right person to fight a disembodied supernatural entity who rocks both the First and Third Power. Russ Logan is great at chases where he leaps over obstacles, his cool-guy black trench coat billowing in the wind behind him like a cape. But what do you do when the perp just laughs off bullets and can easily leap 10 stories to the street and run off? Not a whole lot. But he keeps trying. At one point he pulls out a box of grenades -- “buddy on the bomb squad gave me this stuff for a rainy day” he explains, which in my opinion raises a lot more questions than it answers—and has to be gently reminded again that this is basically an immortal spirit and explosions aren’t going to work any better than gunfire.

This makes for a kind of amusingly frustrating cop movie. Everything that makes him a good super-cop is kind of useless in this scenario, but it’s all he’s got, and also it’s the only story template that the movie can think of, so he just has to keep doing standard super-cop stuff and it just keeps not working. He still goes about the basic super-cop routine, getting a sexy sidekick, shaking down suspects, chasing the killer in a variety of exciting variations. Normal cop movie basics, except that they already know who the killer is and he’s a superpowered ghost, so there isn’t much to investigate, and every time he chases him down the guy just laughs and flies away or something. In retrospect, it kind of explains why SILENT RAGE had to keep Chuck Norris unaware of the killer’s existence for pretty much the entire runtime. When Chuck puts you down, you stay down. A Chuck Norris movie where Chuck keeps catching the killer, but then he just vanishes with an evil laugh and goes about his business while Chuck stands there in impotent disbelief is drifting pretty far off-brand. (Speaking of which, Brian Libby, who played the killer in SILENT RAGE, gets a little cameo here as an undercover cop who notes, “Even a psycho fucking killer is smart enough to stay out of the rain.” A nice touch! There’s also a Bill Mosely cameo in case you had any doubt this was definitely, officially, a horror movie.)

Love that he wears this mask, even though they know who he is and, in fact, he can look like anyone.

This would be a lot more interesting if the movie leaned into it a little more, unfortunately. I would count myself as a Lou Diamond Phillips fan, but he’s the wrong fit for material this nutty and potentially subversive. The movie is at its best when it embraces its eccentric, twitchy energy, and neither Lou nor co-star Tracey Griffiths is able to meet it there. Both are offering pretty bland cop movie cliches when the material probably needed more of a Nic Cage freakout vibe, especially since Kober is cheerfully hamming it up as the smugly taunting killer. Lou, in particular, is frustratingly unrattled by all this, budging not one inch from his cynical, smart-mouthed cool guy routine during the entire runtime, even as he’s easily thwarted again and again. Which makes him seem less like a confident tough guy and more like a brittle phony who can’t acknowledge that this situation has gotten way out of his control.

Fortunately, the situation does get pretty far out of control. Though the script is pretty bedrock-standard for this kind of thing in its totality, it’s full of the kind of little quirky bits that impart it a lot of personality. The killer pulls out a ceiling fan --which keeps spinning somehow-- to menace our heroes, and uses it to deflect bullets (a nice touch, especially since he doesn’t even care if he gets shot). A cop gets murdered by an evil horse-and-buggy, driven by a ghost wearing a sombrero. And they have an exciting (?) car-vs-horse-and-buggy chase right after! There’s a crazy bag lady who gets possessed and gleefully flies around and practically goes full EVIL DEAD. They use a bed to block a door that still has a sleeping guy in it! There’s a huge car stunt where they launch this thing what must be fifty feet in the air and crash it. They commandeer a civilian car, only to find that the driver is almost too enthusiastic to assist, scootching to the middle seat instead of getting out and shouting “No! Look, I’m not one of those anti-cop types!” and effusively offering his assistance “if you need help with some creep!” After a lengthy demolition derby where Lou smashes up his car trying to shake a supernatural masked killer clinging to the roof, he may come to regret this hardline pro-cop stance.

There’s a bit of a fun, “try-anything” vibe here, and movie doesn’t seem particularly interested in establishing rules. I understand the First Power well enough, but I’m not really sure how the Third Power part –the possession one, which gets a good bit more play—works, exactly. The killer is a spirit, and sometimes he does stuff like impossibly move around a room so wherever you turn he’s there. But then he’ll leap through a window and smash it as though he’s solid? It’s explicitly mentioned that he can’t directly affect anything unless he possesses a human body, but when he does he’s still able to do all kinds of blatantly supernatural shit like fly and shake off multiple bullet wounds? To compound matters, while he’s possessing people he still looks like himself to Logan, except that also sometimes he doesn’t? Presumably, he must be possessing a body every time he physically interacts with our protagonists, which means Logan kills a lot of innocent people who just happen to be temporarily possessed, but he sure doesn’t seem too broken up about it, or, in fact, to notice or consider this fact at all. Well, except once: At one point, the killer (still looking like Jeff Kober) is temporarily defeated by hurling him off the railing of an abandoned industrial tower. But then they get down to the bottom, and suddenly they see the mutilated corpse, impaled on some scaffolding after falling hundreds of feet, and it turns out to be… Logan’s asshole boss (Dennis Lipscomb, UNDER SEIGE). Oops. This prompts his other boss to angrily say “All right, yeah, yeah, he was a drunk and a total prick… but he was also a lieutenant in the LAPD and I do NOT BELIEVE… [pauses, collects himself] and I do not believe that he suddenly went FUCKING insane, or was secretly a member of some FUCKING cult.” Which is a pretty reasonable reaction, except that Lou just blithely says, “You gotta give me some more time, Al.” And he does! He just sighs and says “All right.” Man, I feel like if I’d impaled my boss, who I had a well-established fractious relationship with, after flinging him off the top of a huge industrial tower, they’d at least bring me down to the station and get a statement. This guy doesn’t even get a “your gun and your badge” moment! Makes you think this isn’t the first time he’s done this.

All this is laudable, and makes this a much more entertaining watch than you’d have any reason to expect. Unfortunately it’s also kind of badly structured, taking nearly 40 minutes to finally get the main scenario with the disembodied killer going in earnest, and struggling to generate much narrative momentum after that since, you know, there’s not really a whole lot that Detective Russel Logan can do about this situation except have an action scene, which is quickly established to be a very ineffective response. There’s a lot of wheel-spinning, and even if that wheel-spinning is sometimes pretty entertaining in its own right, it makes for slower going than a movie this daffy needs. And the non-action detective parts are pretty unbearable, since it’s not like there’s really a big mystery here.****  

Still, not too often you end up with something which is both of great academic interest and has two or three banger car stunts even though it’s arguably a horror movie. As far as movies which are most notable for their unique kind of brokenness go, this at least offers a generous helping of the goods. Though these two flavors of genre spectacle might not taste great together, the portions of both are ample enough to make for a fulfilling, if not exactly satisfying, meal. It’s a shame that making a solid genre-bending horror-action hybrid is not one of the three powers that can be bestowed on man by God or Satan, but as long as genre fans remain undiscriminating, I imagine someone or other will keep trying.

 

* In fact, though you needn’t look far to find exceptions to the usual genre setups, they’re rather more likely to be explained by the general blundering incompetence of the people making the films than they are to be cases of well-developed narrative plotting exploring different dynamics. Sure, plenty of horror movies have male protagonists, but is that, like on purpose to curate a different power dynamic, or is the writer just a hack who hasn’t really thought through the genre mechanics at work here? Female action heroes do strike one as more purposeful, though more in the sense that the filmmakers often seem to consider them a eccentric gimmick rather than a mode worth seriously exploring.

 

** If you wish to experience peak cringe, I encourage you to read the book-length, obviously-written-by-her IMDB Bio, which describes her in the very first paragraph as: "An ageless beauty with the face and figure of a woman decades younger, on-screen and off, it doesn't take long to find yourself under her spell. She possesses an intensity, sharp wit, a penchant for bucking traditional gender roles, and a wild spark of passion for life that's evident in her every action. An empathetic, self-aware woman with a compelling personality and a strong voice; Arlen is all this, and more." Lady, this is IMDB, not Tinder.

 

*** I missed the part of the Bible where Jesus went around taking over people's bodies, but I guess just because he could doesn't mean he wanted to.

 

**** The one big bombshell they reveal is that the killer was either molested as a kid or had to watch his mother get molested by his grandfather (I’m a little unclear if it was both or just the latter), which is a fact I’d just as soon not know, actually, if it’s all the same to you. It’s not like the killer has a single redeeming quality, so making us consider his miserable, abusive childhood does not seem like a productive direction to take this material in. Plus it doesn’t exactly help them any, except that they use it to taunt the killer in the climax, which is actually pretty fucked up IMHO.

Scream and Scream Again

Scream and Scream Again (1970)

Dir. Gordon Hessler

Written by Christopher Wicking, based on The Disoriented Man by Peter Saxon

Starring Alfred Marks, Michael Gothard, Vincent Price, Christopher Matthews, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing (cameo)

SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN would be more accurately called SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN AND THEN SCREAM A THIRD TIME, because it’s all about threes. First, its three producers: Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky of the venerable also-ran British horror house Amicus studios being joined in this case by the equally venerable Louis Heyward of American exploitation house AIP. Second, its three “stars” – Amicus regulars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, along with AIP go-to Vincent Price, probably the three biggest marquee names in horror at the time, together for the first time, no less! And finally, its three plots, because it begins by introducing us to three seemingly unrelated storylines. In the first, a jogger who runs with an unimpressively floppy form (prolific British bit player Nigel Lambert) has a heart attack, only to wake up in a mysterious, sinister hospital where they slowly amputate his limbs. In a second, a sadistic military officer (Marshall Jones, CRY OF THE BANSHEE, MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE) steadily rises through the ranks in an unnamed European dictatorship. And in the third, a no-nonsense police superintendent (Alfred Marks, THE FRIGHTENED CITY, VALENTINO) and, I guess, an assistant coroner (Christopher Matthews, SCARS OF DRACULA), who sort of gradually turns into the protagonist through a process of attrition and the need for this sort of movie to have some blandly handsome British youngsters, seek a mystery killer in a series of apparently vampiric rape-murders. How on Earth could this all fit together?

Indeed, how could three sets of such unusual triplets fit together? Well, the answer is that they don’t entirely, because the movie’s a weird mess. But I confess to rather enjoying the messy, confounding, winding journey it takes. I’ll be damned if I know what to do with it, but give SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN credit for this, at least: it’s probably not what you’re expecting. First of all, it’s really more of a science-fiction thriller than a horror movie, despite the presence of Price, Lee, and Cushing (and they’re not much of a presence at that; Price eventually gets a bit to do, but Lee is a minor character and Cushing has just one throwaway scene). But second and most importantly, it’s a pretty wild --practically deranged!— ride, but for all the insane convolutions it takes, it turns out there really was a discrete destination in mind the whole time. It’s going somewhere. I’m not saying it makes sense, exactly, but somehow the movie does sort of tie everything together at the very end. But I do mean the very end; for the vast majority of its none-too-hurried 95 minutes, it seems like we’re watching a bunch of utterly unrelated lunacy, three paranoid, surreal plotlines playing out completely parallel to each other with no obvious connection of any kind.  

Like many movies of the period, it feels a bit dawdling when it would probably benefit from a breakneck pace, and also like many movies of the period, it gets painfully bogged down in groovy pandering to the swinging youth (two lengthy club scenes prominently featuring a trendy British-invasion rock group --in this case Welsh soul outfit Amen Corner). But unlike many movies of the period, it also features the credit “police chase arranged and executed by Joe Wadham,” and for a 1970 British B-movie, this thing’s a real doozy. It involves a diabolical vampire date-rapist (Michael Gothard, THE DEVILS, LIFEFORCE[!!], FOR YOUR EYES ONLY) in a red convertible sportscar (apparently a 1955 Austin-Healey 100/4) tearing around London and the surrounding Surrey countryside with dozens of expendable police cruisers in hot pursuit, and ends up blossoming into a lengthy --in fact, almost comically extended-- foot chase capped with several bouts of superpowered fisticuffs. It isn’t exactly jam-packed with jaw-dropping stunts or eye-popping spectacle, but clocking in at close to 15 minutes of screentime (pointedly beating BULLITT’s 10 minutes, a point of reference clearly on its mind), it ends up building momentum out of sheer moxie. Normally this sort of action spectacle is death for a horror movie, which thrives on tension rather than excitement. But a few touches of grotesque weirdness --the killer rips off his hand to escape a handcuff, and can crack a human skull with his punches— help resolve the disconnect here. It’s classic action cinema, but with a touch of the genuinely weird, both exciting and a little disconcerting. It honestly makes me wonder if these two genres aren’t as mutually incompatible as I’d always assumed.

As a fifteen-minute chase scene tangent might suggest, the three plotlines are all a little shaggy, which makes a little more sense when you learn that the credited author of the novel which became the basis for SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (originally titled, appropriately, The Disoriented Man), one “Peter Saxon,” is actually a pen named most frequently used by Irish journalist, pulp author, and editor W. Howard Baker, but, the novel itself was apparently written primarily by fellow pulp author Stephen Frances, with additional possible input from Martin Thomas. All three men were veterans of the Sexton Blake detective stories which are said to number over 4,000[!] entries, and it’s unclear which of the three, if any, was the dominant creative force here. Several websites –all unattributed, I’m afraid—suggest the novel was the result of a “round robin” type writing exercise, which would obviously do much to explain its otherwise befuddlingly unconnected trio of storylines. But whatever the explanation, each tangent affords at least a few oddball pleasures. There’s not exactly a surplus of whammy (the gore is infrequent, though impressively gnarly and clearly shot when it does happen), so with Price, Lee, and Cushing only rarely on-screen, the movie must primarily rely on its pervasive strangeness to keep engaging. Fortunately, it is indeed very, very strange, so that works out.

How strange, you ask? Strange enough to feel completely comfortable removing the novel’s explanation –BOOK SPOILERS it turns out the villains are aliens! END BOOK SPOILERS —and replacing it with… nothing. No explanation at all. It’d be pretty weird to just throw extraterrestrial conspiracies into the mix of a movie which already contains a vampiric car chase, but it’s even weirder to just leave it unexplained, and that’s the kinda shit we’re rolling with here. SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN doesn’t give a fuck about your pathetic need for explanation. It’s just gonna let its freak flag fly, and you’re gonna have to deal with it. Some may find this intolerable; me, I was kinda disappointed to hear there ever was an explanation. I prefer the film’s satisfaction with the vague, uneasy ambiguity of it. So the movie is definitely weird, but obviously I’m on its wavelength.

Well, mostly, anyway. One weird thing which is less effective is the jazzy, sunny score by David Whitaker (VAMPIRE CIRCUS) which is, one can’t help but notice, monstrously inappropriate for such a bizarre, unsettling thriller, and does a great deal to undermine whatever tension director Gordon Hessler (MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE) might be building up. Not that the movie strikes one as being impeccably planned by a master craftsman or anything, but there’s weird which is productive, and weird which is counterproductive, and the groovy Bond music knockoff soundtrack is probably the latter. I might be more inclined to tolerate this kind of tomfoolery in an Italian flick, but it’s an ungainly and awkward look for the British. Italian genre films are the cinema of pure sensation, content to luxuriate in any sufficiently evocative artistic element; British films, especially from the 70’s, have a stiffer and more calculated feel, making an inappropriately funky soundtrack feel less like an indulgence in extravagant overstimulation and more like a misjudged attempt to feel hip. But no matter, few 70’s horror flicks, and especially British ones, feel as wildly out-of-control and unpredictable as SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN manages, and if that blurs its focus, it rarely blunts its impact. And that’s enough to recommend it all by itself.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	TRIPLE DISTILLED HORROR... as powerful as a vat of boiling ACID! I should probably mention that yes, there is a vat of acid in the movie.
TITLE ACCURACY	Completely meaningless, but that just add to its weirdo vibe.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, from the pulp novel The Disoriented Man by “Peter Saxon” (actually some combination of W. Howard Baker, Stephen Frances, and Martin Thomas).
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	UK/USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Boy, um, gosh. Vampire, I guess? Sci-Fi Horror?
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, though none are especially prominent and Cushing in particular only has one throwaway scene.
NUDITY?	My teenage self would never have believed it, but I swear I don’t even notice anymore. Those creeps on IMDB do include “Frontal female nudity” in their keywords, so I’ll bow to their superior collective horniness.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None.
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	Gosh, um. I dunno, man, “don’t go jogging because you’ll look like a dork and then have your limbs cut off” is about the best I can do for you. Otherwise…

The Mummy (2017)

THE MUMMY (2017)

Dir Alex Kurtzman

Screenplay by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, Dylan Kussman, Story by Jon Spaihts, Alex Kurtzman, Jenny Lumet (uh oh)

Starring Tom Cruise, Annabelle Wallis, Sofia Boutella, Jake Johnson, Russell Crowe.

            Let us steel our nerves and consider, for a moment, THE MUMMY. No, not THE MUMMY (1911), nor THE MUMMY (1932) nor THE MUMMY (1959), nor THE MUMMY (1999), though you’d be forgiven some confusion. And in fact, I’d wager that confusion is not unintentional; every Mummy film ever made since the first one has been animated primarily by the cynical hope of coasting off the good name of another Mummy film and hoping that vague recognition alone will be enough to inspire good will in audiences. The whole concept is simulacrum made flesh (and then desiccated and mummified and revived years later believing that some British blonde is is the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian princess, but that’s neither here nor there).

But there has always been one fatal flaw in that logic: there is no “good name of another Mummy film.” And that’s because every single extant mummy film is terrible.* Even the “classic” 1932 Boris Karloff version is, let’s face it, even more boring than it is racist, and frankly has maintained its iconic standing more through association with its worthier peers in the Universal Monsters canon than through any inherent value in the film proper. The Mummy itself --all caps as a proper noun, for the concept is by this point an intrinsic part of the American cultural psyche far more than it is a reference to any specific artistic work-- may well have the singular distinction among the horror icons of achieving its lofty status without ever at any point actually being associated with a single film which was any damn good at all. It is, I have come to believe after an absolutely exhausting survey of Mummy fiction, a trope which has always owed its entire existence to hustling coattails-riding. It’s never been good, but somehow it did manage to become familiar, which in marketing terms is just about the same thing.

            With all that in mind, THE MUMMY (2017) starts to make a little more sense. But even still, only a little more sense. There is, I guess, a certain sadistic logic in making a new movie called THE MUMMY, in that it is, you know, a name people would sort of generally recognize and with which they might perhaps harbor vague positive associations without being able to explicitly name any concrete reason as to why. In fact, even its ostensible creators may have had a pretty hazy idea of what, exactly, there were supposed to be ripping off: it was originally billed as a “reboot of Universal’s ‘Mummy’ Franchise,” though whether that referred to Universal’s original 1932 Mummy series or Stephen Sommers’ 1999 series starring Brendan Fraser was never made clear, and may in fact never have been explicitly decided one way or another by any of the 60 or so people who manifestly had a controlling stake in what could generously be called the “creative process” here. It certainly hews closer to the latter’s mix of corny action beats and desperate comedy, but really resembles neither in any meaningful way except through the incidental presence of, you know, a The Mummy. Which, of course, is the sole reason for its existence in the first place; this was not a story told because someone had an idea for a story; it was a story told because someone had to write a story to justify the existence of that title. But if we must simply remake every single thing that has ever existed and wormed its way, however undeservedly, into the broader cultural consciousness, this was inevitable anyway and we might as well have gotten it out of the way in 2017 as any other time.

So sure, it all makes a kind of nihilistic sense, radiating a kind of soporific calculation so inescapable you can basically watch it unfold on-screen in real time. And yet, even knowing all that, even having written it all down in black and white, I still can’t quite overcome the unbelievable wrongheadedness of taking a classic horror icon and trying to fluff it into a huge-budget action franchise vehicle. I mean, how could anyone ever have thought this was going to work? To the extent that the Universal Monsters are known at all, it is as clearly and starkly as horror icons as anything fiction has ever produced. What in the world would make anyone think they would (or should!) have any salience outside that context? I get why Universal Studios would want them to (money), but even at that most cynical, mercenary level, surely someone had to see that this was hopeless. I can see why they’d want to sell it, but who in the world did they imagine would actually want to buy it?

 Let’s just say what we mean here: this 2017 movie currently enjoying our critical attention exists thoroughly and unreservedly to fulfill some Universal executive’s dream of having a popular shared-universe franchise (embarrassingly branded the “Dark Universe”) just like Disney has with Marvel. And since Universal didn’t buy superheroes, they’re banking on their stable of classic monster movies to generate the distasteful but unavoidable “content” necessary for there to be a universe to share. This is the goal --the entire motivating force behind the existence of THE MUMMY (2017)-- and the marketing guys have sunk their teeth into this plan and aren’t gonna let it go til it ain’t moving.

But the thing is, nobody except Universal executives and their associated marketing teams have ever showed the slightest bit of interest. They keep starting this thing, failing spectacularly to find an audience, abandoning it in disorganized, humiliating defeat, and then inexplicably starting over (the 2004 VAN HELSING debacle, the 2010 WOLFMAN debacle, the 2014 DRACULA UNTOLD debacle, and now this too died at the box office). But no matter how often it fizzles, they can’t seem to accept that the problem is in the fundamental idea. All the money in the world can’t convince people that they want something which has no practical reason to exist.** Just because something enjoys a wide name-recognition among the lucrative 18-34 demographic doesn’t mean you can utterly upend its context and still maintain its original power, no matter how much you might wish otherwise. And I just can’t imagine any sane writer or director feels otherwise. Nobody had a burning passion to make this movie any more than anyone had a burning passion to see it. But in order for it to be marketed, it had to be made, so here is it. All Hollywood movies are made for crass commercial reason, of course, but it’s rare indeed to find so many resources being spent to craft a work of art entirely at the behest of the marketing department.

Well, and at the behest of Tom Cruise, the only marquee brand here whose name is not THE MUMMY. In the wake of the movie’s failure, people seem to have been eager to shift the blame to the actor, who supposedly exerted a huge amount of control over the finished product, from re-writing the script to supervising the editing. And that seems like a pretty plausible theory; It’s not at all hard to see some very distinct parallels with the star’s recent MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and JACK REACHER pictures and their similarly relentless march of globetrotting nonsense stringing together a parade of mostly-practical stunt-work setpieces. This sort of wham-bang blockbuster cinema is laughably out of place in a movie about a Mummy, of course, with its very best sequence (a legitimately cool uncut take of Cruise and a bunch of stunt-people tossed around weightless --for real!-- in a crashing plane) having almost nothing to do with the title character at all. But even if you want to blame the entirety of the film’s misplaced action-movie ambitions on Cruise, he’d still only be responsible for one of the three or four completely unrelated movies vying for supremacy during the film’s unexpectedly demure 110-minute runtime (practically a short film by the standards of modern blockbusters). And it’s by no means the worst of them.

Those four unrelated movies are as follows, in descending order of tolerability: A mummy movie, an action vehicle, a prequel to a mummy movie, and a labored franchise-servicing purgatory starring Russell Crowe. All are bad in their own way, of course, but some are rather more exotically dismal than others. In the first of these movies, a couple of incessantly quipping mooks --Cruise (AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER), Annabelle Wallis (ANNABELLE [and niece of Richard Harris!]) and Jake Johnson (that smarmy millenial fuck-o from JURASSIC WORLD***) find a --hey! what have we here?-- mummy’s tomb [!] due to some sort of convoluted horseshit about the US military in Iraq,**** and get themselves cursed in the process. Standard mummy stuff, but made tolerable by its likable cast, by-the-book plotting, and surprising deftness for horror staging. You’ll notice, in fact, that this simple premise would be comfortably sufficient to fill out an entire movie. But this is a big studio blockbuster in the year of our Lord 2017, so “enough” is, of course, never enough until it’s “far too much.” And thus we get three additional movies competing with the only one which has any real legitimate reason to exist.

 The second movie is some kind of setpiece blockbuster doggedly committed to hurling frantic stunt sequences at us every now and again, and mostly indifferent to the fact that it’s about a The Mummy or whatever. These sequences are pretty middling by Crusie’s usual standards, but the plane crash bit is a winner, and there’s even a rambling chase sequence that occasionally remembers that it’s in a horror movie and uses its mammoth budget to give us some enjoyable zombie mayhem which you could never get in a movie with a normal zombie budget, so not a total wash. Third, we have, intermittently, the story and --ominously, as longtime Mummywatchers are all too aware-- the backstory of the title character (Sofia Boutella, CLIMAX). Supposedly this was once a more prominent part of the movie, as in the final product Boutella has almost nothing to do but stand around looking menacing and flash back to the origins of her Mummying in a rather wearying repetitive manner. Here we might actually be able to thank Cruise for jealously excising his co-star’s tiresome life story from the final cut, because this is, of course, utterly dire stuff. Still, it’s a venerable and --more to the point-- inescapable part of the basic Mummy movie boilerplate, so we could hardly be surprised that it remains, even in the year 2017, an inconvenience that veteran connoisseurs of mummy fiction expect and resign themselves to endure.

The final movie, though, is something wholly unexpected. This is because, crudely sutured into this thoroughly quotidian paint-by-numbers Mummy Movie yarn, we find something exponentially weirder, a subplot about a secret society of monster hunters which feels like the jarring intrusion of a completely separate movie, because that’s in fact what it is: the covetous tendrils of the “Dark Universe” creeping their way into a unambitious self-contained little thriller to force the world, against its better judgement, to acknowledge the existence of a shared universe which does not, by God, actually exist yet, and may never exist. And thus it is that before we meet a single character who will actually be germaine to this particular tale, we encounter one Dr. Henry Jekyll***** (Russell Crowe, NOAH) owner and operator of a monster-hunting franchise called “Prodigium” which appears to be quite a lucrative venture judging from their expansive, well-appointed headquarters with enough jumpsuit-sporting henchmen and technological goo-gahs to handily pass for a Bond Villain’s lair.

Crowe is, for whatever reason (possibly alcohol-related), obviously having a ball hamming up a performance which consists wholly and without exception of tedious exposition, most of it necessary only to explain his own incongruous presence in this mummy movie. He’s clearly decided that the only possible means of survival is to turn the thing into some kind of high camp parody of a terribly-written exposition-spewing non-character crammed into a movie that has neither need or space for him, entirely in a labored effort towards servicing a franchise which may never actually exist. But while this is obviously the correct approach, and does something to render this little sub-movie slightly short of instantly lethal, everything about this plotline is useless and burdensome and completely stops the movie dead in its tracks, efficiently euthanizing any lingering bits of momentum that might have been building up while the creative team wasn’t paying attention. Without it, THE MUMMY 2017 would simply be unfocused mediocrity; with it, it becomes something closer to a genuine boondoggle, something which will seem absolutely confounding to a hypothetical future audience who does not have the proper context to understand why there’s a 30-minute teaser commercial for a non-existent franchise jammed into the back half of an otherwise stock mummy flick.

In a way, a spectacular disaster is a more interesting thing to have in the world than a middling studio flick too unimaginative to embarrass itself in any noteworthy way, which passes unremarked upon through cinemas and promptly vanishes from human memory. But you know, there are moments -- and only moments, to be sure-- where one wonders if perhaps “middling mediocrity” and “staggering folly” weren’t the only two possible outcomes here, if there wasn’t an actual good movie to be found here, if only someone had stopped to notice it. Those moments have little to do with Tom Cruise stunts --which are found in profusion, and in rather more colorful array, in other movies better suited to their charms-- and are certainly never found in the enervating mummy backstory or even in the disposable clutter or the basic plot. Where they are found is the only real surprise in the whole film, because they turn up in the one place the movie seems least interested: its mostly-forgotten origins as a horror movie.

For whatever reason (craftsman’s pride, perhaps, or simple boredom, but surely not a deep sense of belief in the project’s artistic merit) “creature designer” Mark 'Crash' McCreery (JURASSIC PARK, LADY IN THE WATER) actually designed some pretty great-looking reanimated corpses which make full use of the film’s indefensible budget to offer us a range of impossible herky-jerky movements and imaginative demises that are simply out of reach for horror films that don’t employ an army of visual effects artists. I also very much like the double-iris eyes which makes for the film's most striking visual. Most important, though, THE MUMMY 2017 offers something that almost no other Mummy film has so far been able to convincingly produce: a skinny, desiccated, unwrapped mummy lurching around on brittle bones like a malevolent spider on the hunt. It looks, in other words, like a genuine mummified corpse, not like some beefy guy wrapped in toilet paper, a distinction which lends it an unexpected visual potency despite its familiarity.

 The image of a spindly, half-skeletal ghoul has actually been part of Mummy fiction for quite some time; Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 gothic classic Lot No. 249 --which comprises, along with Bram Stoker’s 1903 Jewel Of The Seven Stars, the baseline popular origin of the genre******-- describes just such a creature, which would have, in fact, likely been more familiar to the Victorian Egyptophiles of his time (who delighted in “mummy unwrapping parties” -- a pass-time only slightly less morbid than today's "unboxing videos" ) than the bandage-swaddled version which has since become the standard iteration of the concept (and certainly saw its high-water mark with Christopher Lee’s imposingly buffness in Hammer’s 1959 THE MUMMY). McCreery, cinematographer Ben Seresin (PAIN AND GAIN) and director Alex Kurtzman (first-time director,******* but long-time bane of screenwriting as part of the dreaded Orci/Kurtzman duo) make the most of the exotic design by highlighting its boney, impossible movements against --why, what have we here?-- gothic swirling mists in an old abandoned churchyard! Holy shit, it’s almost like this was the correct context for a century-old horror icon all along! Who woulda thunk it?

It’s a trivial thing, of course, in the face of so very much howling sound and fury signifying nothing, but it’s also a frustrating glimpse of the simple pleasures which were right at the filmmakers’ fingertips, had they bothered to notice them. For all the miserable, inept mummy movies that have been made (and they’re all miserable an inept), there is something about this concept that has continued to stir the imagination of generations of horror fans. At a particularly low point in my journey through mummy fiction, I lamented that a mummy is basically just a solitary zombie that can’t bite you, and maybe we ought to admit it simply isn’t a cinematic concept worthy of much more exploration. But that’s not really true; or anyway, not entirely true, though it’s certainly a fitting complaint for virtually every single iteration of the concept I’ve ever seen on screen.

Fundamentally, a reanimated mummy should (or could, at least) have a little more resonance than that. A mummy doesn’t just traffic in our discomfort with dead bodies and the appalling wrongness of their return to some sort of unnatural half-life (though of course it does this too, and with a unique tactile quality perhaps better embodied in this movie than any other, of a body not rotting or mutilated, but rather desiccated, drained of its vital fluids in an uncanny parody of preserving vitality). More than our fear of dead things, it traffics in an almost Lovecraftian sense of unknowable antiquity reaching into the present in unanticipated, incomprehensible ways.******** Very nearly 200 years after Jane C. Loudoun published The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (the earliest tale of a reanimated mummy that I can identify) our knowledge of the ancient Egyptian culture has grown exponentially, but it still maintains its ability to mystify and intrigue us, as evidenced by its integral place in the essential folklore of our time, from conspiracy theories to ancient alien hypotheses. For all our technological progress, we are still awed and humbled by the scale and permanence of what they achieved, and the level of sophistication they reached literally thousands of years before our time.

A mummy, then, is less a metaphor for our fears of death and loss of personal identity than it is a cultural avatar from a forgotten past, challenging our smug certainty that we are the unquestioned masters of creation. In a chapter of Jewel Of The Seven Stars which he deleted from subsequent editions, Stoker actually makes this point explicit: if, in fact, the central mummy succeeds in using the unknown magic of antiquity to revive itself, the staunch Englishmen don’t just lose a battle, they lose their very sense of identity. Their belief in the essential correctness of their culture, religion, and basic understanding of the mechanics of the universe, get swept away into a terrifying chaos of uncertainty. This, I think, is the key to The Mummy’s persistence as a iconic figure despite a century of dull film iterations; at its core, the Mummy symbolically challenges not only the frailty of human life, but the fragility and vulnerability of our most fundamental assumptions about ourselves and the world. It is an alien, an other, emerging from a world out of time, a world utterly unfamiliar and remote but so manifestly remarkable that its very existence is a challenge to our innate sense of superiority. If the mummy bests us, we’re not just in physical danger, we’re existentially at risk of being forced to relinquish our place as the arbiter of civilization to its rightful heir.

All this was right there for the makers of this film, which had every conceivable resource to realize these themes if any film ever put to (digital) celluloid could ever be so described. And the most infuriating thing is that the ingredients are all unmistakably there; the film has a great sense of the disturbing corporeal wrongness of the mummy’s reanimated remains (when the filmmakers bother to try for it), and even adopts Stoker’s essential structure of a possession tale, personalizing the basic metaphor of culture being supplanted by the malevolent manifestation of the ancient primordial past. Hell, it even goes one step further and adds the unnecessary but intriguing detail that this is the product of imperial overreach: for the Victorian and Edwardian Brits presiding over an uneasy globe-straddling empire, anxieties that the “natives are restless” found outlets in the “Imperial Gothic” tales of the time which provided the fertile soil from which sprung the origins of mummy fiction. But in 2017’s THE MUMMY, we find the inciting incident to be the product of a different type of colonizer: a US soldier looting native treasures in American-occupied Iraq. It’s almost enough to tempt one to wonder if someone here, writing some far-removed early version of the script from which these tiny vestigial details were retained even absent their original significance --as a dozen more writers brazenly re-shaped the tortured mass into new and ever more contorted convolutions-- knew what they were doing. But probably they just happened to blindly snare a couple key ideas in their brute trawl of every possible cliche their predecessors had yet devised.*********

So it has the right ingredients to actually make something of its premise, though hopelessly mixed into a haphazard, overflowing pile of unrelated and contradictory detritus. As I have admonished so many times in the past, however, ingredients are not a meal. And it will come as no surprise to you that despite these potentially salient elements being present at various points in the plot, the movie makes absolutely not the slightest thing of any of them.The uniqueness and majesty of Ancient Egypt, in particular, is woefully neglected; though we do get some requisite flashbacks, the Egypt our antagonist occupies is a bland, undefined space, filled mostly with medium-sized candle-lit rooms which are furnished almost exclusively with billowing curtains (which actually seems like kind of a fire hazard, but I guess you worry a lot less about that in houses built of giant limestone and granite slabs). With the exception of name-checking notorious Egyptian heel-god Set (sometimes also called Seth), “Princess Ahmanet” might as well be a villainous witch from any time and place in history, or, perhaps more likely, from no specific time and place at all. And if it can’t even be bothered to engage with the one essential element of its own basic premise, you can hardly expect it to do any better with the more tangential elements: The film abandons its promising horror imagery almost as quickly as it stumbles upon it, and shrinks away from its provocative Iraqi war elements with a pronounced discomfort which is almost palpable.   

Which is, I realize, not telling you anything you don’t already know. 2017’s THE MUMMY is dumb and bad, just like all mummy movies are dumb and bad, which was already so obvious to you that you’ve never even considered seeing this piece of crap and have only read this far into this review in the vain hopes of trying to understand why I would so unwisely do so. And yes, it’s dumb and bad. But I’m sorry to say you’re going to have to see it anyway, and I’ll tell you why: for reasons too pointless to get into, the action eventually moves to a secret crypt hidden under London’s subway system, where the bodies of returned crusaders have been interred. And what does the Mummy do when she arrives? Why, raises the departed knights from their tomb, of course. And just like her, they’re ancient, eyeless, desiccated corpses still wearing the symbols of the ancient Templar order to which they belonged. You see where I’m going with this? Undead, eyeless Templars! This is basically the fifth BLIND DEAD movie!********** And at one point Tom Cruise punches one of them and gets his hand stuck in his ribcage! So it’s not all bad news. In fact, compared with the rest of the BLIND DEAD movies, this is probably one of the two or three best! As both reanimated mummies and the filmmakers behind the venerably lowbrow subgrene of Mummy fiction almost always eventually discover, context really is everything.

                                                                                   

                                                                                    FIN

* THE MUMMY (1911), being a lost film and therefore unseen my me, is a possible exception, though the plot synopsis does not exactly inspire confidence.

**  Or anyway, can’t always do it; that the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST remake from 2017 grossed over a billion dollars provides ample evidence that it certainly can be done, and also also as a bonus definitively proves that there is no God and we live in a cold, indifferent amoral universe where ‘justice’ and ‘right’ are empty, meaningless abstractions which crumble like dry leaves before the might of Lord C’thulhu.

*** He did play “Jesus Christ” in A VERY HAROLD AND KUMAR 3D CHRISTMAS, though, so I can’t be too mad at him.

**** A weirdly tone-deaf plot device by any metric, and made even weirder by its absolute needlessness and total irrelevance to the rest of the so-called story.

***** Dr. Jekyll, of course, was never part of the Universal Horror canon (there was a 1931 Paramount version with Fredric March and a 1941 MGM version with Spencer Tracy) though, as with VAN HELSING, Universal Executives seem absolutely convinced to the contrary. Perhaps they’re getting confused by the existence of 1953’s ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, as near as I can tell the only classic Universal production to ever include the character? But if meeting Abbott and Costello is all it takes to be considered a iconic Universal Monster, the Keystone Kops may also turn up in the “Dark Universe.”

****** Of course, we can trace the lineage back further than that, as I intend to do in my forthcoming book-length A Cultural Anthropology of the Mummy. But for today’s purposes, I think it’s fair to call those two stories the basis of the modern conception of “The Mummy” as a distinct boogeyman of the horror genre. (Bonus trivia: Louisa May Alcott, of Little Women fame, wrote a very early “Mummy’s Curse” story called Lost in a Pyramid; or, The Mummy's Curse in 1869, decades before either Doyle or Stoker. It does not, however, feature a resurrected, ambulatory mummy seeking revenge)

******* And why not hire a first-time director for a huge franchise-inaugurating iteration of an iconic screen classic with a budget of $200 million?

******** Indeed, Lovecraft himself wrote (or co-wrote/ghost-wrote, with Hazel Heald) a mummy story of his own: 1935’s Out of the Aeons. Of course, Lovecraft was racist enough that he damn sure wasn’t going to situate a great lost civilization in Africa, so it’s a mummy from the lost continent of Mu. But we know damn well where mummies come from, Howard. UPDATE: As commenter Matthew points out, Lovecraft too knew where mummies come from; early in his career, he ghostwrote a story called Imprisoned With The Pharaohs (1924) for none other than Harry Houdini.

********* A quest which also snared, I might add, some decidedly non-mummy related fiction; how else do we explain the brazen daylight robbery of several specific plot elements and even scenes from AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON? Did one of the writers misread the memo and start watching werewolf movies before someone corrected him about the genre he was supposed to be ripping off?

********** Or sixth, if you want to count the other unofficial BLIND DEAD sequel, John Gilling’s 1975 La cruz del diablo.***********

*********** By the way, I want to point out that that tenth footnote marks a decisive record for most ever footnotes on a single piece I’ve written! Thanks, THE MUMMY!

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