Gird your guts, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is hardcore gore

If you’re thinking ‘I liked that old Brendan Fraser movie – can’t wait to see the reboot!’ Hold that thought. In fact, bury it, right now, six feet under.

This ‘Mummy’ is not a similarly jolly swashbuckling romp. Nor, thank goodness, is it the sequel to Tom Cruise’s 2017 outing – a CGI-laden snore so poor it killed off the entire Dark Universe franchise.

No, this is Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. And, as horror geeks will know, that means you’d better gird your guts for some hardcore gore.

A pre-credits opener will gauge your stomach’s tolerance levels. An Egyptian family arrive at their humble nectarine farm in Aswan which, mysteriously, has a whopping great pyramid in the basement.

In it lurks a killer mummy, and she’s not happy. A face is graphically ripped apart with a metal claw and there’s a jump scare – where no one in my audience jumped because it was an audience chock full of hardened horror influencers.

‘No sweat’, was the smug collective vibe. They played right into Cronin’s hands. It’s a good 50minutes until the Irish writer/director brings out his big bloody disgusting guns.Til then it’s mainly a missing child drama concerning an American family.

Whilst dad (Jack Reynor) and mom (Laia Costa – giving it her considerable all) are working in Cairo, their little daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell and later Natalie Grace) is kidnapped by a stranger offering a juicy nectarine in the manner of Snow White’s apple. Cut to eight years later and Katie has been found, wrapped up in mummy cloths in a sarcophagus.

But she doesn’t look or behave like the Katie they remember. The doctor says she’s traumatised and locked in. Katie just needs her family’s loving care. Yet what should be a joyful reunion turns into a living nightmare.

The best horrors are rooted in wider societal fears. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy initially plays on Americans lost, vulnerable and endangered in an Arab country – then kind of forgets about all that.

Instead, more surprisingly, it re-imagines the mummy franchise as closer kin to The Exorcist: a possession movie allegory of a parents’ horrified reaction to their adorable little girl turning into a foul-mouthed, eye-rolling, uncontrollable teenage monster, who either blanks you or attacks you. In fact ‘The Daughter’ would be a more accurate title.

And it’s this claustrophobic family angle that proves most successful. Despite an overlong run time (2hr 12 min) the tension builds up nicely until the finale where all disappears in a no rules vortex of nonsensical CGI that noisily mashes up pretty much every horror genre going.

Both Cronin’s debut, The Hole In The Ground (2019) and his inventively gruesome franchise reboot Evil Dead Rise (I’ve never looked at a cheese grater the same way again) were similarly rooted in maternal anxieties. And gnarly, intense violence. And books made out of skin. This Blumhouse outing is more entertainingly fun though. If you can stomach it.

The gore is nasty, but in a chew your nose off, spit it back in your face with an evil grin kind of way.

There are camp bits and comic relief. However, make no mistake, this is properly, 18-rated nasty. Even my fellow audience of gorehounds were going ‘ew!’.

Excruciatingly stand outs variously involving toenails, teeth and fingernails to traumatising effect. In particular Cronin gives an inspired, super grisly spin on the whole bandaging (and unbandaging) dimension of a mummy, that I still can’t unsee in my mind.

‘Some things are meant to stay buried’ is a foolhardy tagline for any reboot. This one at least deserved to see the light of day.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is out in cinemas on April 17.

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