Filmmaker Joseph Kahn made a good point recently: few filmmakers possess the artistic authority to brand a film as their own in the title. If you cannot match the technical mastery and atmosphere of “John Carpenter’s The Thing,” get out of here.
That’s why it puzzles me that Blumhouse would decide to name it “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” no matter how much they wanted to disassociate from the Brendan Fraser movies. They probably should have retitled it altogether, especially since early reviews suggest this isn’t even that much of a mummy movie, but rather something closer in tone to Cronin’s “Evil Dead Rise.”
That raises the question: given how popular the horror genre is these days, if this had been called something like, say, “The Resurrected,” would it have enticed more people to buy a ticket?
Cronin’s film is an utterly depraved take, filled with gore, torture, and violence — the kind of excess that tends to divide critics. The review embargo has lifted, and “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is getting panned, currently sitting at 41% on Rotten Tomatoes (for “Top Critics”) and 47 on Metacritic. Anyone surprised?
The Film Verdict’s Alonso Duralde: “While sitting through its interminable 133 minutes, I found myself parsing the difference between the unsettling and the merely unpleasant, and between the grotesque and the icky.”
This is the third feature Cronin has directed, after “The Hole in the Ground” and “Evil Dead Rise.” The budget is rumored to be in the $30M range. Furthermore, the film is rather long, clocking in at 134 minutes, which means there’s a whole lot of movie in there. Hopefully audiences know by now that Brendan Fraser is not in this movie.
The film stars Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, and Veronica Falcón, and it’s slated to hit theaters on Friday.
Festival press conferences have turned into landmines of political questioning, to the point where some artists would probably prefer to turn down being a juror at Cannes, Venice, or Berlin.