THE SUN'LL COME OUT TOMB-MORROW

Now playing:

Lee Cronin's The Mummy--No fewer than four earlier horror movies have been titled The Mummy; this new one comes with a onscreen directorial signature. Cronin is the Irishman who wrote and directed the 2023 Evil Dead Rise. His mummy flick should please fans of that movie, as it's essentially Evil Dead Rise with some Egyptian trappings. For the rest of us, though, it's likely to be a tough slog.

An expat American family--TV reporter Dad (Jack Reynor), medical Mom (Laia Costa) and a daughter and son--live in Cairo. The daughter, Katie, is abducted from the family's garden by a witchy presence. Eight years later, poor Katie not having been found, the family has moved back to Albuquerque, and added a new adorable daughter, as well as the sassy gramma (Veronica Falcon).

When Katie turns up alive back in Egypt, catatonic and desiccated, they bring her home and try to care for her there. Gruesome mayhem ensues. Meanwhile back in Egypt, a police detective (the striking May Calamawy) probes the mystery of what happened to her. As might be expected, it's not pretty. 

Cronin is by no means without talent. He has a fine eye, and he can generate atmosphere. His script is nutty but coherent on its own terms, unlike, for instance, that of the recent undertone. There's nothing really new here--the story seems indebted both to The Exorcist and to John Carpenter's 1987 Prince of Darkness--and many of the plot points, starting with but not limited to the idea that a child in this condition could be cared for at home, are deeply stupid. But that in itself wouldn't be a dealbreaker if the movie weren't so rotten-spirited.

Again, this may just be what the market will currently bear for contemporary horror fans. But, as with Evil Dead Rise--I'm a big fan of the original Raimi Evil Dead flicks--I seem to have lost my stomach for this sort of extreme horror shtick; I can't find the terrorizing and torture of little kids entertaining.

The smug, nervy way the director uses wonderful, comforting elements as a supposed ironic contrast to his shocks also soured me on Lee Cronin's The Mummy. He doesn't seem, for instance, to share the Mel Brooks 2,000 Year Old Man's enthusiasm for nectarines. And Cronin uses maybe the most uplifting of American popular songs, The Band's "The Weight," as the background for a scene of ghastly gore.

Fortunately, "The Weight" is more powerful than any splatter that Cronin can muster. But of all this movie's sins, that may be the hardest to forgive.

MOTHERS, FATHERS, SONS

Opening this weekend...

Evil Dead Rise--This fifth feature in the beloved horror series that began in 1981 moves most of the action out of the woods and into the city. An earthquake uncovers a copy of the "Book of the Dead" in the bowels of a decaying L.A. apartment building. Near the tome are a couple of vinyl records on which a priest has recorded the incantations necessary to invoke the evil spirits that re-animate dead bodies to torment the living. The kid who finds all this is an aspiring DJ, so he has turntables, so...

Through this laborious set-up, the lissome tattoo-artist single mother (Alyssa Sutherland) ends up possessed by a malevolent force. It's up to her guitar-tech sister (Lily Sullivan) to defend her nephew and two nieces. Gruesome mayhem ensues, hitting on the obligatory tropes of the series--grinning, leering, levitating corpses, oceanic amounts of gore, hurtling demonic POV, the repeated phrase "dead by dawn!"--as well as nods to Kubrick's The Shining and to Fargo.

I'm afraid I've run out of patience with this style of horror flick. Watching a woman's corpse terrorize and murder her children probably wouldn't be my idea of entertainment in any case, but here it's not only unpleasant but tedious. I've grown weary of films in which characters stand transfixed as something ghastly happens in front of them. After a while one begins to suspect that all the interminable gasping and whimpering and slowly backing away may not even really be about generating terror or heightening suspense, but rather about padding a thin script out to feature length.

Sam Raimi's original Evil Dead trilogy was not inconsequential cinema. The "shaky cam" techniques that Raimi and his cronies developed on those indies, out of economic necessity, were highly influential on the Coen Brothers and Barry Sonnenfeld and others. But beyond the realm of technical innovation, Raimi's movies, especially the marvelous Evil Dead II of 1987, had a low-tech vigor, a whimsical sense of macabre comedy and a guileless campfire-story gusto that, combined with the one-of-kind slapstick acting of star Bruce Campbell, made them classics.

Raimi and Campbell are listed as executive producers on Evil Dead Rise, but almost none of the twisted magic of their early work can be felt here. There's some elegance to the production design, and leading ladies Sutherland and Sullivan are stunning, Bukowski-style L.A. goddesses. There's a sweet line in which the youngest niece tells her aunt why she thinks she'll be a good mom someday. And the Hieronymus Bosch-like horror into which the demon's victims conglomerate themselves is a decent Raimi-ish idea, though the CGI renders it soulless.

I'm told that this film, directed by the Irish Lee Cronin, was originally slated to open on cable TV but got a theatrical release after test audiences took to it. So it may be that I've just aged out of this sort of thing, and the movie will truly please audiences. If so, even though it's not for me, I nonetheless find it cheering that people still want to scream in company.

Somewhere in Queens--Less than a month after opening the Phoenix Film Festival, Ray Romano's feature directorial debut opens theatrically here in the Valley. Romano, who co-wrote the script, also stars as Leo Russo, a bedraggled hangdog sad sack who works for his family's contracting business in the title borough. Leo isn't the favorite son, however. His father (Tony LoBianco) shows more respect to Leo's slick brother Frank (Sebastian Maniscalco). Maybe everybody loves Raymond, but nobody loves Leo.

Well, that's not true. His siblings and his wife Angela (Laurie Metcalf) love him well enough, but they don't take him seriously, or listen to him. A sultry widow (Jennifer Esposito) on a jobsite seems to take a shine to him, but he's not the adulterous type.  Leo does have a source of pride, however: his quiet son "Sticks" (Jacob Ward) is a high school basketball star. One night at a big game, Leo and Angela are surprised to learn that Sticks has a girlfriend (Sadie Stanley) they didn't know about. The same night, they learn that he may be good enough for a college scholarship.

Though it's often funny, a forlorn atmosphere hangs over the early scenes of this movie that had me bracing for some sort of wretched tragedy that would leave the characters standing around emergency rooms or something like that. But the story, though it stings, doesn't drag us through the mud; it takes off in unexpected and painful yet believable and sometimes exhilarating directions.

The feel for the setting is convincing, and so is the large cast. The ensemble scenes are well-executed, especially the girlfriend's debut at a big family dinner, where she both irks and impresses the relations with her nerviness. Romano plays Leo as a toned-down version of his stage and sitcom persona, cowed and slow-witted, and his tentative, apologetic boyishness is poignant, even when you can see how his family could find it irritating.

For a while it seems like the film is underutilizing the mighty Metcalf, but finally Angela gets her big moment. Romano lets her articulate the theme of the movie, admitting probably the most frequent emotion of the parenting experience: Fear.

Also opening this weekend, at Harkins Chandler Fashion 20 and Harkins Arrowhead, is Tom Huang's fine comedy-drama Dealing with Dad; it's slated to play at Harkins Shea and at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre in Sedona starting April 28. I reviewed it last year, after it made the rounds of several festivals including Phoenix Film Festival. It's very much worth checking out.