Write a commentIt took me a while to get into the Hellraiser franchise.
I remember seeing the VHS slipcover at Red's Video. A man with pins in his head and a box in his hand grimacing straight ahead. There was a weird intensity about it that unnerved me. To this day, I don't think I could tell you exactly why it bothered me so much. It wasn't until fall of 2009 that I finally sat down to watch the first.
Those of you who know the franchise know the basic plot. It's an honest-to-goodness freakshow of a horror movie. Wall-to-wall gore with some pretty gooey monsters. It is certainly disturbing, but also alluring in a way. Christopher Young's score helps quite a bit. It has a sense of mystery to it, teasing what's to come, not unlike the box in the film. After the first, I was hooked, no pun intended.
The second is within striking distance of the original and the third acts almost like a more streamlined Hollywood version of the themes explored in the first two. I was off to a good start and not looking back. Then came Hellraiser: Bloodline. It has a solid premise but something felt off about it. I couldn't figure out exactly what it was, but something just seemed weird. For me, the fourth was a drop off from the third. Maybe Hellraiser: Inferno (the fifth entry in the series) will buck the trend.
It didn't. The same strangeness permeated the fifth entry. It was like switching over to Diet Coke after a lifetime of drinking regular Coca-Cola. The latter Hellraisers left a strange aftertaste. Curious if I was just crazy, I did some research and I found something that could explain it. Apparently, the franchise was so popular that producers would buy up screenplays that had nothing to do with Pinhead or the Cenobites, order a rewrite to include Pinhead and pals and boom, they had a new Hellraiser. These movies were never meant to be Hellraiser films; they were meant to be independent of a franchise. Money hungry producers (is there another kind?) made the creatively bankrupt decision to inject characters. That's why they didn't feel like Hellraiser movies; they weren't. If we were continuing with the Coke/Diet Coke analogy, it would be the equivalent of someone filling a regular Coke bottle up with Diet Coke and trying to tell you you're crazy for noticing the difference.
Lee Cronin is a bit of an anomaly. An Irish director, he has three features under his belt including Lee Cronin's The Mummy. I haven't seen his first feature, The Hole in the Ground, but I've heard good things about it. Where he really splashed on the scene was 2023's Evil Dead Rise. While I may have been behind in my Hellraiser knowledge, I've been watching Evil Dead films for much longer than most normal people. They've always been very close to my heart due to the sheer inventiveness of the filmmaking and the humor. Sam Raimi is a true master of the form and genre. 2013 brought us a new Evil Dead film. While not as inventive or humourous as the previous Raimi films, it was highly entertaining.
When Evil Dead Rise was announced, it was originally planned to premiere on HBO and not have a theatrical release. I'm unsure what changed people's minds, but it ended up being released in theaters. There's a lot to like about the film. The cast is uniformly good, especially the two adults. There's plenty of gore and suspense, but it never felt like an Evil Dead movie. Like a man that glues feathers to his arms, it doesn't make him a chicken. Just because you call a movie Evil Dead doesn't mean it feels like an Evil Dead movie.
The focus on the family unit and themes of motherhood seem like they're out of a completely different film. Furthermore, as far as I can remember, no other Evil Dead film made the Deadites or The Book of the Dead specific to any religion. To my memory, I don't recall any mention of a religion whatsoever. That's part of the appeal. Too many films about demons are saturated with Catholic iconography. Even right now, I'm sure you conjured an image of a priest holding a Crucifix. It's classic for a reason, but the Evil Dead series left it nebulous, leaving the audience off-balance. In a movie with a ton of Catholic things, priests and prayer can help you. What helps you in the Evil Dead universe? Not much, really.
Evil Dead Rise makes the odd decision to include crucifixes. Even the demons have now been homogenized. To be honest, I don't know what kind of movie Evil Dead Rise reminds me of, but it's not really an Evil Dead movie. It's some mishmash with a lot of Easter eggs for fans, but they come off as lazy and forced. By the end, I don't really care all that much about the characters or their fates.
When I heard Cronin was working on a Mummy adaptation, I was skeptical but intrigued. The guy seems to know how to craft gory and uncomfortable sequences. If nothing else, Evil Dead Rise was shot well, why wouldn't his version of The Mummy be any different?
It's kinda half and half. Within the 133 minute runtime, you can see glimpses of a leaner, meaner horror film. I appreciate the time and care that went into establishing all the characters and the situation, but at some point, I had hit my limit. I'm not sure if this was entirely the reason, however. Perhaps if we had a more charismatic lead than Jack Reynor. Reynor has been in a few things I've seen (most notably Midsommar) but he never really made much of an impression on me. Of all the characters in this version of The Mummy, Reynor's probably gets the most screen time. Given that, he has ample opportunity to make an impression. Unfortunately, while he has much to do, nothing he does is all that impressive. He's just kind of a blank slate for the majority of the film.
As far as the plot goes, a little girl named Katie gets kidnapped and goes missing for 8 years. When she's found in a 3,000 year old sarcophagus, she's still alive but in very bad shape. It's up to the family to figure out what happened to her. Which is also not entirely accurate. Suspension of disbelief is very much a thing, especially when it comes to a supernatural horror movie. It helps to not nitpick every plot point, otherwise, you'll never enjoy much, if any, of it. Does it make sense to anyone out there in Readerland that the daughter was brought home? This is a person that we're told has been in a 3,000 year old sarcophagus. Don't you think she should be kept for some testing?
She goes home and, of course, there's some kind of demon attached to her. But maybe not "of course" because this is a mummy movie. Mummy movies are typically about ancient curses and bugs and sand. This has all those things, but for wide swaths of the film, it plays like a sun bleached version of The Exorcist and that's not what I came to see. I'm not saying that I'm looking for the goofiness of the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies or the ill-fated Tom Cruise one from 2017. It would be nice to have a serious minded movie where people are getting their brains scrambled and then mummified. I'm a simple guy with simple tastes.
Instead, Cronin seems to not have confidence in his concept and again gives us a movie that's packaged inside another movie. With Evil Dead Rise, we got some kind of Catholic spookiness and shoehorned throwbacks to the Evil Dead series without ever really feeling like an Evil Dead movie. Lee Cronin's The Mummy is almost more an Evil Dead movie than Evil Dead Rise. You can throw all the money at these projects that you want but it doesn't change what they are. I love The Exorcist as well as most of The Evil Dead films, but don't smash them together and call it The Mummy.
Rumor is Cronin is looking to make A Nightmare on Elm Street sequel. I'm all for that if he actually makes a Nightmare on Elm Street film. If history is any indication, it'll end up being a mummy movie.
If you're looking for a decently fun time where you can just turn your brain off and watch some gross stuff happen, you could do a lot worse. But in a world where we've gotten so many top tier horror films in the last decade, I was expecting a little more.
I wanted Coke and I got Diet Coke in a Coke bottle. And the aftertaste is killing me.
Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026)
Directed by Lee Cronin
Cast: Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, Shylo Molina, Billie Roy, Veronica Falcón, Hayat Kamille, May Elghety, Emily Mitchell
Runtime: 133 minutes
MPAA Rating: R (for strong disturbing violent content, gore, language and brief drug use)
Rating (out of ****): **
Lee Cronin's The Mummy is available to stream on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
