Like, cute American co-eds with nice hair go on a mummy hunt, ya know…
Before I began watching The Mummy Resurrected, I wondered how anyone could make a mummy movie with a budget of only $750,000. Then, as I watched the film I understood. Most of the money was spent on special effects (they were reasonably good and a few were very good) but there really wasn’t anything left to pay for a good script or actors or a director. And, speaking of a director and script, it is very odd that when I looked up this film on IMDb, I noticed that although the cast and producers were listed for the film, this is NOT the case for the director or writer. Perhaps they didn’t want to have their names associated with the film — all I know is that it makes no sense to omit these two very important credits.
- The Mummy Resurrected
- Directed by
Patrick McManus - Cast
Stuart Rigby, Lauren Bronleewe, Elizabeth Friedman, Bailey Gaddis - Release Date
1 March 2014 - Martin’s Grade: D
The film is the story of six cute co-eds who are inexplicably in Egypt and are invited along on a mummy hunt. Now considering that these young ladies don’t seem to know the first thing about archaeology and seem like extras from a college sorority film, I felt perplexed. Yet, somehow we are expected to believe that one of them has a long-lost archaeologist father and instead of mounting a proper expedition with SUPPLIES, appropriate clothing and Egyptologists, for instance, he takes these six cute undergraduates into the desert to look for some ancient burial site. Once there, the three guides he brought are murdered (by whom we never have any idea—as it looks like the writer forgot about this plot thread) and he and the girls just ignore this and go exploring!
Later, the girls start dying—one by one. Does the girl whose father brought them there care? Not particularly—she just wants to hang out with daddy. Nor, unfortunately, does the audience care as it took so long for these deaths to occur that you’ll find your attention sadly waning. Much of it is because the ladies’ reactions were so muted. I’ve seen women break fingernails and act more upset than these actresses when one of their friends dies. I also had to laugh because one of these well-trained and well outfitted ladies had to use her smart phone as a flashlight inside the tomb because you can only assume they forgot to bring enough flashlights for everyone! So how does it all end? Who cares?!
Let’s cut to the chase–the film is quite poor. The dialog was often atrocious (‘it’s like I totally blacked out’), the story was often dull, the edits were occasionally poor (scenes would go from full sun to dusk and back within the same scene) and the film never really made a lot of sense. These folk also didn’t really seem like actresses—more like ladies who showed up for a campus kegger and on the way got invited to appear in the film because they had nice hair and looked kinda cute.
The bottom line is that the 1932 version with Boris Karloff is a classic. See that instead.
by Martin Hafer
