Scary Girl is Scary

I feel like I have to address why this movie is getting reviewed here, on Asteroid G, instead of over on my other website, Castlevania: The Inverted Dungeon. That site is generally where I review monster movies in the vein of vampires, werewolves, scientific abominations, and, yes, mummies. Occasionally, though, I do tend to break that mold. When something comes out that doesn’t feel like a good fit for the traditional monster movie coverage of my Castlevania site, I bring it over here for review. You can look at Werewolf By Night, which is more of a MCU work than it is a werewolf special. Or you can see Invisible ManOriginally created by H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man is probably best known from the series of Universal Monsters featuring various versions of the titular character., which isn’t covered on my other site because the Invisible man himself isn’t a major player in that game series’s mythology. Sometimes things just don’t work over there.

Having just watched Lee Cronin’s The Mummy in theaters this past weekend, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where this work should go. It has “The Mummy” right in the title, which generally would send it over to my Castlevania site, but that’s about the only thing that feels like traditional mummy media. This film has less to do with mummy mythology than it does the likes of The Exorcist and Evil Dead Rise (which Cronin also directed). It feels like a film that had a veneer of mummy storytelling applied over top of a more standard possession tale. 2017’s The Mummy has more to do with a traditional mummy story than this film does, and it pains me to give that film any praise.

That also, in the end, led to a film that utterly bored me. I don’t know what the specific motivation was for the development of this film (which was developed by New Line Cinema, Atomic Monster, and Blumhouse), but the end result is a film that feels painfully generic even as it tries to do some new twist on classic material. It’s a movie that never can find its footing, copying bits and pieces from other, better works, until it all peters out after two hours and fifteen minutes. It’s a slog, and whether you consider it a traditional monster film or not, no one is going to call this movie enjoyable.

The film opens in Egypt where Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) works as a journalist while his wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), works as a nurse at the local hospital. During a shift where she’s at work, Charlie stays home with their kids, Katie (played as a child by Emily Mitchell) and her younger brother Seb (played as a child by Dean Allen Williams). Katie gets into a fight with her brother and heads out into the garden to have a tea party, but she’s interrupted by a woman (Hayat Kamille) who says she’s the mother of Katie’s best friend, Layla. The two talk, and then the mother gives Katie a piece of fruit which has a bug in it, and that bug that paralyzes Katie so she can then be taken by the mother. The two disappear, and Charlie and Larissa spend the next few months searching for their daughter.

Eight years later, Kate (now played by Natalie Grace) is found. She’s apparently been kept trapped in a sarcophagus for all that time, locked in a kind of paralysis she couldn’t escape from. The doctors release her to go with her parents back to their home, which is now in Albuquerque, New Mexico, so she can be cared for by them. But once she’s home, strange things start happening. Despite being locked into her own mind, it seems like sometimes Katie is able to get up and move around, and the more she does, the more weird shit happens. Dark and dangerous occurrences begin, animals start lingering outside the house, and even their other children, Seb (now played by Shylo Molina) and Maud (Billie Roy), are falling under her powers. Whatever has Katie, Charlie and Larissa have to find a way to stop it, whatever it takes.

As I noted above, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (which, yes,, was written and directed by Cronin) has less in common with any mummy film you’ve seen and more in common with classic possession films, including Cronin’s own Evil Dead Rise. This is a story of a girl possessed by an ancient evil who then unleashes her power on the rest of her family, causing much death and destruction until the survivors are able to find a way to contain the power and put a stop to the madness. Throw in a book made of flesh and a guy with a chainsaw and you functionally have another Evil DeadStarted as a horror cheapie to get the foot in the door for three aspiring filmmakers -- Raimi, Tappert, and Campbell -- Evil Dead grew to have a life of its own, as well as launching the "splatstick" genre of horror-comedy. film by a different name.

That wouldn’t bother me on its own, mind you. A film can borrow elements from other movies and be good. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is functionally a political thriller, borrowing heavily from the other works of the genre it was transplanted into, but that movie is also fun as hell, making the whole affair go down smooth. What Lee Cronin’s The Mummy lacks is any kind of sense of fun. It’s a tedious chore that takes forever to get moving and, even then, only lurches forward in fits and starts. It’s fine to borrow from other works but you have to do it well or your film will compare unfavorably, as this movie does.

Not that good mummy movies are all that common. There was the 1932 The Mummy by Universal, which is pretty good, powered in large part by the performance of Boris Karloff. And then there’s the 1999 The Mummy, which has a rollicking good time pretending to be an Indiana Jones adventure while mashing in mummy material. Those are really the best of the lot, while there are dozens of tedious, boring films that don’t know what to do with the central monster. In that regard, Lee Cronin’s film is just one more for the pile.

Except it really isn’t a mummy movie and calling it that is really just a lie. This is a story about a possessed little girl, and what few Egyptian trappings are in the film are just window dressing. A movie has to make the central mythology essential to the story for it to really work as a mummy film, and this movie doesn’t. When all it takes to remove the “mummy” aspect from this film is changing the nation it takes place in and the language etched onto the wraps of the character, that means it’s barely a mummy film at all. You could toss Katie into a burlap sack with Aztec writing on the bag, and then set the film in Mexico for its first act and the function would be the same. Or, hell, ditch the wraps, foreign setting, and other light trappings and you could just make this into another Evil Dead. This film barely relates to the monster it’s trying to reinvent, going so far astray that it wanders into a completely different film series. It barely is capable of being a monster movie at all.

I hate getting stuck on details like that, but this film feels even further removed from its source monster than 2025’s Wolf Man. Lee Cronin’s film has as much to do with mummy stories as Scooby Doo does with Sherlock HolmesOften cited as the world's greatest (fictional) detective, this character was introduced in 1887 (in A Study in Scarlet) and has gone on to appear in hundreds of stories, films, shows, and more.. Sure, they’re both detective stories, but that’s about the only connective tissue between them. I dislike that this film is called a mummy movie when it’s just a boring The Exorcist knock off, and I already hated that film so I felt like I was duped into watching this one. You lured me in with the promise of a monster film, and then pulled a massive bait-and-switch. That just sucks.

So on all fronts this movie is awful. It’s boring, it’s tedious, and it has nothing new to say, either about its own material or the monster it purports to adapt. I really can’t even call this a mummy movie, and that pains me since it’s literally in the title. This is just a boring, terribly made, possession film and we’ll all be better off letting it fade into irrelevance. When it comes to mummy films, I’d rather watch the Tom Cruise movie than this pile of crap.