"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘Jack Reynor’

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

Monday, October 12th, 2026

“What the fuck was our daughter doing in a 3,000 year old sarcophagus!?”

Yeah, I know, it’s real funny that LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY is called LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY. I’m not normal, so I saw that title and knew Lee Cronin was the director of an okay movie called THE HOLE IN THE GROUND (2019) that got him the job on EVIL DEAD RISE and now this is his third movie. Normal people see that title and think I don’t know who the fuck that is. So it’s funny that they wouldn’t let him just call his mummy movie THE MUMMY and made him put his name on it. This is true. But let’s move on.

Now, to the important business: this is a good movie! Research confirms it got mostly bad reviews, but I’m telling you, there are delights to be had here. I had heard people say it was more like an EVIL DEAD movie than a mummy movie, sometimes meaning that as a complaint, but obviously it’s a selling point for me. To me the worst EVIL DEAD movie (Lee Cronin’s) is better than the best modern mummy movie (the Tom Cruise one). But now this is the best modern mummy movie precisely because it uses some mummy tropes but with the energy, momentum, style and outrageousness of an EVIL DEAD. It’s very gross, it takes itself seriously but has a great sense of absurdity and dark humor, it has a momentum to it even though it’s over two hours. (I’m sure it helps that they have Bryan Shaw, editor of EVIL DEAD 2013, EVIL DEAD RISE and nine episodes of Ash vs. Evil Dead. Director of photography David Garbett is also a veteran of RISE and Ash vs.) LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY quite firmly fits into the spookablast category, so I recommend it to fellow aficionados of such blasts. (read the rest of this shit…)

Midsommar

Monday, July 8th, 2019

MIDSOMMAR is the new one from HEREDITARY writer/director Ari Aster. It’s about a group of drugged out (and in some cases horny) young people running into some craziness during a summer vacation, so hopefully nobody will pretend it’s not a horror movie.

It’s very much in the vein of Aster’s first one, because it has weird and ridiculously detailed cult rituals, meticulously designed sets and camera moves, slow ominous dread building to big/crazy/gory payoffs uncharacteristic of modern arthouse horror, superb acting performances, an emphasis on tense relationships and heavy emotions, and an undercurrent of dark, uncomfortable humor that got a bunch of big laughs in the audience I saw it with (though, if HEREDITARY is any indication, people will tell me I imagined that). So it’s a similar template, but a very different palette, because there’s nothing supernatural and there’s not much darkness. It takes place in an old-timey village in Sweden where everyone wears white, it’s sunny all day, and the nights are short and never get all the way dark. (read the rest of this shit…)