The Mummy Returns

Karnak... 
And How To Get It

The Mummy Returns
USA 2001
Directed by Stephen Sommers
Universal UK Blu Ray

Warning: Some major spoilers.

The Mummy Returns was my most looked forward to movie going experience of 2001, I suspect. The Mummy, reviewed here, was probably the best, big budget, old school adventure movie since the first of the Indiana Jones movies and a whole bunch of us had tickets to see the sequel in a big West End cinema in London’s Leicester Square on its first weekend. I had a very strange experience with this the very first time I saw it though... my friends all loved it but I was really disappointed in it that first screening. I don’t know why but I suspect this is the first of a few films where there was so much stuff thrown at the screen that maybe my mind got distracted and couldn’t process it all on the first run. Fortunately, because my parents had loved the first one and wanted to see this one, I had promised to take them to see it as soon as it opened in my local cinema the following week. I’m grateful that I did because, bizarrely, I absolutely loved it the second time around and, looking at it now, it certainly does still hold up well. 

It’s not as good as the first movie but it does have a lot going for it and, above all, it leaned more into what the first film did for a lot of its running time... temper down the horror aspects and stick more with the action and humour. Not always the best tactic, granted but, yeah, it works really well here. 

All the big guns from the previous film are back for the second helpings too and, they certainly haven’t steered clear of certain characters taking on a new depth in terms of growth and some blatant tweaks. We’ve got Brendan Fraser back as Rick O’ Connor, Rachel Weisz back as Evelyn (now Rick’s wife), John Hannah back as Evelyn’s brother Jonathan, Oded Fehr back as Ardeth Bay, Patricia Velasquez as Anck-Su-Namun and Arnold Vosloo as Imhotep. 

Some of the characters are expanded thusly... Rick O’ Connel discovers the tattoo on his arm from the orphanage as a kid is a sign that he’s an honourary member of the Medjai (Ardeth Bay’s crowd), Evelyn is actually a rebirth of Princess Nefertiri (the living family line of the daughter of the king killed by Imhotep and Anck-Su-Namun at the start of the previous movie) and Patricia Velasquez is the living embodiment of Anck-Su-Namun in the 20th century... and who chooses to host Anck-Su-Namun’s soul in her body.

There are also three very important new characters... Freddie Boath plays Alex (the son of the O’ Connell’s), Shaun Parkes plays Izzy (an old ‘friend’ of Rick) and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson makes his non-wrestling debut as The Scorpion King who, although he’s one of the film’s villains, was liked so much by the crowds here that he spun off into the first film of what became a Scorpion King franchise. 

Okay... not going over the plot here because a) I don’t particularly want to spoil it anymore than I’m going to in a minute and b) I’m sure most people would have seen this one by now. But, of note in this one are the following...

There are a couple of great fights between Rachel Weisz and Patricia Velasquez, taking place in ancient Egypt in one instance and also the current setting of the film, 1933 (around a decade after the events in the first movie) and, considering they are both wearing masks for the majority of the first fight and the dynamic moves and flips the ladies perform, well, you’d think they had a really good couple of stunt doubles. Not so, though. It turns out that both these actresses trained for these fights for 5 months and no stunt performers were involved. So, yeah... those fights are actually quite something in terms of the actresses in question. There’s also a nice replay of the ancient murder scene from the start of The Mummy but seen from Nefertiri’s point of view, watching from afar, which explains why the king’s guards were able to arrive at the scene of the crime almost immediately. 

Alex accidentally knocks down all the support columns in a temple near the start, in the exact same configuration as Evelyn did with the library book shelves in the first movie. Later, when he’s trying to resurrect Evelyn back from the dead using The Book Of The Dead from the first film, he stumbles reading the exact same symbol/character that Jonathan did in the first film... down to using his arms to mimic the flight of a bird, just as John Hannah did. I don’t know who had the idea but, apparently, the 10 year old Freddie Boath who plays Alex cited The Mummy as his favourite film and had seen it at least 30 times. So he quickly became something of an on set advisor for the cast and crew between his scenes and, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was his idea to make the wing flap mannerism when he gets stuck at that same word. Just conjecture though and, either way, it’s a really nice touch. 

Oh wait... did I say Evelyn’s resurrection scene? Nobody ever sees this one coming (including me) but, around half an hour from the end, once Alex has been rescued from kidnappers and also from having the life sucked out of him by the bracelet of Anubis, Evelyn is killed. Run through by Anck-Su-Namun in a perfectly timed scene which really takes you by surprise. And, to the director’s credit, this doesn’t play as a throw away moment. She has a proper ‘last words’ death scene and Rick enters a temple after Imhotep (and the reincarnated Scorpion King), in full vengeance mode. Director Sommers even does a nice series of shots using different takes in different lighting environments all crosscut together of Rick walking down a tunnel to emphasis his ferocity... which is a really nice touch. So the audience really feels the loss of Evelyn but then, wonderfully, her son manages to resurrect her (and Nefertiri co-sharing her body) and she returns to kick ass and help out in the final battle between good and evil. This is all sold really well and, once again, my hats off to the writer/director. 

Anck-Su-Namun also has her own resurrection scene earlier in the movie and I suspect it’s more than just coincidence that it plays out near a body of water... which I suspect is a veiled reference to scenes which were shot but, alas, excised before release - and never re-found - of a scene between Boris Karloff and Zita Johann in the 1932 production of The Mummy (reviewed here). 

Unfortunately, due to various reasons (depending on who you believe), Jerry Goldsmith didn’t return to score this one... instead we have Alan Silvestri doing his own thing with the music and, although I wonder how good a Goldsmith soundtrack might have been for this film, Silvestri does a really good job at bringing some big themes and exciting action music into this one. 

And I think that’s me about done on The Mummy’s Return. Definitely not a jump on movie, you’d have to see the first one if you want to get the most from it but, still, a great action adventure tale with a lot of humour and, once again, the writer/director makes the audience feel like they’re in on the joke with all the genre clichés and tropes... rather than being treated as idiots. I have a lot of time for this director... and these movies... and they’re just the ticket if you want big, periodical action mixed into your viewing experience. A pretty great sequel, it has to be said. 

The Mummy (1999)

In My Humble 
Opinion... Tep!

The Mummy (1999)
USA 1999
Directed by Stephen Sommers
Universal UK Blu Ray

I remember when this version of The Mummy first came out in cinemas. I was worried about it because I love the Universal monster movies of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and I was concerned that Stephen Sommers, who was said to be making more of an action adventure film, would be doing the concept a disservice. Then I went to the cinema and saw the finished product for myself and, wow, I absolutely adored this right from the start. I remember The Matrix was released in the UK about a week later and I remember hating that one and thinking, why didn’t I just go see The Mummy again rather than pay out for that. I did see this film a few more times at the cinema though and, even though it has several mistakes (which the director gleefully points out in his informative old US DVD commentary... I’m assuming this is the same one ported over for this Blu Ray) it’s still an absolute masterpiece.

So, the film is a strange tonal hybrid in that, yes, there are certain scenes, mostly in the first half, where Sommers is definitely playing with the film in terms of the horror genre and, although there are a few great fight sequences in the first hour, he really does push the creepiness of the concept a lot more than, I think, people realise once they get caught up in the next hour. So, for example, the sequences where The Mummy is first brought back to life and runs around in the tomb as panicked archeologists and treasure hunters try to escape him are the film very much going into good old fashioned horror mode. There’s even a creepy prelude culminating in a jump scare in an early scene which takes place in a library and sets up one of the characters.  

But there’s more to this as the film is injected with a good dose of old 1930s-50s adventure movie serial components, pushing the Indiana Jones aspects of the film and ratcheting up the action and nostalgia stakes that come with that territory. And it’s done with a huge dose of humour which, yeah, could have gone terribly wrong for the movie but, because the script on this one is so good and, because the various actors are so brilliant in this, Sommers manages to pull it off with ease and, in doing so, he created a lasting classic which still endures and holds up now. 

As for those actors.. we have Brendan Fraser who is, frankly, brilliant in the role of adventurer Rick O Connell, playing him with a lot of humour and confidence. We have Rachel Weisz as librarian Evie, who is a kind of feminist version of a 1920s heroine and gives as good as she gets and, indeed, even has a penchant for inflicting eye injuries on her foes (in at least two scenes). We also have John Hannah playing her kid brother Jonathan, who is used as comic relief and is a nice contrast to Fraser’s leading man, the two playing off one another nicely. 

Arnold Vosloo as title character Imhotep is absurdly good in this role and almost a likeable and sympathetic character, if he wasn’t so determined to kill everybody in horrible ways. Kevin J. O'Connor as the weaselly Beni (who had the best line in Sommer’s earlier movie Deep Rising and steals many of the greatest scenes here) is probably the absolute greatest thing about this movie, playing a character so disloyal he ends up helping Imhotep in order to both stay alive and make off with a load of treasure but who, to paraphrase the words of lead character Rick O Connel, gets what’s coming to him. 

Lastly, there’s Oded Fehr as Ardeth Bay and the gorgeous Patricia Velasquez as Princess Anck Su Namun. Both of these characters and their respective actors would get much bigger roles in the first direct sequel, The Mummy Returns. 

As for the direction, editing, cinematography etc... this is also a technical masterpiece... despite the mistakes which have either been edited around or, in some cut sequences, actually created by the editing with shots that either don’t quite match or defy logic if you happen to latch onto them (again, Sommer’s commentary is really worth listening to, if it’s the same one that he did for the initial DVD release). 

For instance, when everyone is running around and trying to escape the mummy’s tomb when he is first revived, one of the characters loses his glasses. What happens next is that when the camera is a point of view from that character or from just behind the character looking away from him, he blurs the focus to imply a POV shot. But here’s the thing, the camera then pans around to this character and the shot changes into sharp focus... within that same uninterrupted shot (and he does this a couple of times in this sequence). So, yeah, that’s the first time I’ve caught a director literally implying a change of POV within the same shot... brilliant stuff. 

He also uses the camera and editing to give us some nice transitions. Such as a moment where Evie and Jonathan are looking at the map. We then cut to a close up of the map before cutting away to Jonathan and Evie and a third character talking about the map in a different location. It’s not a new way of doing things but it’s a nice bit of visual shorthand and it works very well. 

As do some of the visual wipes used in the film. For instance, when Fraser jumps diagonally down into a chamber entrance in the ground, into a tomb in the city of Hamunaptra, a visual wipe follows him diagonally down, revealing him and Weisz already in the tomb. Nice stuff. 

Another thing the director does which really helps lift the film where others trying to capture the same magic have failed, is that he lets the audience in on the joke. For instance, the sudden appearance of wind and atmosphere going nuts when anyone says anything dark and filled with foreboding is certainly a genre cliché and here Sommers does it at least three times. But, here’s the rub, he does it so unsubtly and so self consciously, that the audience realises right off the bat that he’s doing it tongue in cheek. It’s like he’s winking at the audience and saying, it’s okay to not take this seriously... we certainly aren’t. And to spell that out even further, there’s even a scene where it happens yet again and Brendan Fraser says... “That happens a lot around here!” It’s a nice touch and makes all the difference to the way the film is received... the audience are invited to laugh along at the absurdities and genre clichés right along with the actors on screen, elevating the experience accordingly. 

Another great thing about this movie... Jerry Goldsmith. I was at one of many of his concerts I attended over the years and, in at least one of them, he played a suite of music from The Mummy. He told the audience he was really struggling with it and didn’t think much of the movie until he at last found a way to have fun with it. When the sequel came up, he turned it down citing scheduling conflicts and, while Alan Silvestri provides a great score for the sequel, it means the franchise suffers from the same lack of musical continuity that modern Marvel and DC movies have... which is a shame. Even so, Goldsmith’s score for The Mummy is outstanding and, for my money, in the top twenty scores of his long career. The camel race is especially beautiful, as is the heavy percussion which comes in right at the end and the shot transitions to everybody setting up camp in Hamunaptra. It’s easily one of the greatest scores he did around this time and the modern, expanded version of the CD with the entire score on it means I no longer have to leave the old US DVD on the languages menu if I want to hear it in total... as the full score playing from start to end was an easter egg on that disc if you stay in that menu. 

Oh, and about the old DVD... for the British readers here. The Mummy was uncut at our cinemas but had some cuts made for the UK home viewing versions at the time. For instance, the extended hanging scene from near the start of the movie, which in real life caused Brendan Fraser to pass out, was heavily truncated on the UK home video releases. Which is why I would only touch the American release of this movie back in the day. I’m pleased to report that the UK Blu Ray (which is now in a single clasp case with the two direct sequels), has had those cuts waived, so it can be watched properly again in this country now. 

And that’s me about done on this one. Rewatching it now was a real trip and the film holds up very well. I’m looking forward to revisiting the sequels very soon... well, the first sequel at any rate. I’m hoping that the third movie will maybe have grown on me over time. I’ll report back here on those soon.

Hybrid (aka Super Hybrid)

Calmer Car-melion

Hybrid (aka Super Hybrid)
USA/Germany 2010 Directed by  Eric Valette
Koch Media Dual Blu Ray Zone B 

Okay... so this was kind of a cheap buy for me. £2.50 at the local computer exchange for a film I’d never even heard of but which promised to be something in the vein of Stephen King’s Christine or the brilliant ‘demonically possessed vehicle movie’ The Car (which I reviewed here). While the film isn’t as good or interesting as either of these two works, by a long shot, I wasn’t too disappointed with Hybrid and I think if certain elements could have been fixed (or had enough time spent on them), it could have been a truly great little genre movie.

The film starts off with a standard series of nicely edited and montaged panoramic shots of a city but one of the things I liked about this opening was the illusion of fragmentation on the score by Thomas Schobel and Martin Tillman, who manage to give the sound a disturbing, disjointed feel while still being absolutely dead on with the rhythm of the piece. Unfortunately, I have to say that this was really the only point where the film actually managed to impress me and it becomes an exercise in fairly competent, solid but ultimately unremarkable story telling after this point. Which is a shame because I feel the premise has such potential.

The film starts off proper when two people are lured into a car with an open door. They decide to steal it but, once inside, they realise they have made a mistake when the car eats them. A short while later, the same car has a road accident and is towed into a garage for repair. It’s in this multilevel garage that the rest of the film takes place, after first setting up the main female lead Tilda, played by Shannon Beckner, and her abusive boyfriend.

When Tilda gets to the garage to start her shift, we meet her boss Ray, played by Oded Fehr, and a load of other characters who seem to have the words ‘monster fodder’ written in invisible lettering on their foreheads. And, yes, it’s not long before one of them, a guy called Hector, falls afoul of the car and its bloody legacy of doom. The car in itself can change into any colour or model it likes and can self repair at will... except for in those moments where it doesn’t quite suit the dramatic situation, to be fair. Seeing as it can do this, one wonders why it’s in this garage in the first place but if it wasn’t in a confined area, then we wouldn’t be able to see it fulfil its aforementioned ‘bloody legacy of doom’, I guess.

So we have the usual tensions between the characters with Oded Fehr, who I had only seen play heroic roles before in The Mummy and Resident Evil franchises, set up as the main human bad guy of the story. He’s the one who, through his own trickery and willingness to exploit the situation once he’s realised that his employees are to be believed and they are all being hunted by a killer car, is the one you want to see finished off first. Given this, I was actually surprised at how long this character lasts throughout the running time (but I’m not going to give you any spoilers here folks).

As it turns out, the reason the killer car is able to do all this running over, maiming and eating of people is because it’s actually just a bunch of snakes inside. Well... okay... it’s not actually. That’s just what the hum drum special effects look like in certain sequences in this movie when they are trying to illustrate the ‘alien’ness of the car. In actual fact, it’s more like some kind of tentacled Cthulhu creature hatched from the pen of H. P. Lovecraft that has learned to perfectly imitate various motor vehicles with its chameleon-like stealth capabilities. When we finally see the thing revealed it’s not all that terrifying, to be honest, but I guess it’s not really trying to be, on some level.

Anyway, the film trundles along with the group of night workers in the multi-story garage barricaded in with the killer vehicle, for reasons I won’t go into here, and although the script is quite bad and the acting somewhat ropey in places, I thought it had all the right ingredients of being a perfect ‘late night around someone’s house with a few cocktails’ horror movie, to be honest. However, as I was watching it, with the director not quite managing to ratchet up the tension to the desired kilometres per hour, I couldn’t help thinking what a perfect movie it could have been in the hands of someone like John Carpenter or if George A. Romero had directed this thing. Not that the director does a bad job here... I just think certain story and dialogue elements could have been written better.

The film has all the genre cliches you would expect in it, for example. The lead female character who has a tainted reputation, due to a crazy past, which destroys her credibility when she is trying to get people to believe there is a hostile, alien, self-driven car on the loose in the garage. The guy who gets in the wrong car because it’s imitating the ‘safe’ car, which you are just waiting to happen at some point. The inevitable person who runs afoul of the trap that the humans have built to try and destroy the car, etc. Yep, all these and more come to pass and, to be perfectly honest, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that they do. However, the script is quite ‘by the numbers’ in this genre check box kind of way and there’s some incredibly atrocious dialogue for the artists to get through. Nothing is really done to exploit these kind of much loved clichés and raise the bar on them a little.

For instance, when Oded Fehr’s character finally starts to believe his staff about the exact nature of their four wheeled catastrophe, in that it’s a shape shifter, he replies quite straight faced... “You mean like one of those robots from outer space?” Um... what? Does this make any sense people? Is it a veiled reference to the Transformers movies maybe? I dunno, your guess is as good as mine on this one but it’s moments like these, and some of the pacing issues, which firmly place this film in the ‘flawed but relatively entertaining category’ as opposed to the ‘genre masterpiece of weird horror’ category the premise clearly deserves to belong to. Which is a great shame, to be honest.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this movie. Possibly a great thing to screen late on a Friday night with a group of friends when you are all equally sozzled but not quite in the ‘instant classic’ category I was kinda hoping for on this one. Certainly not the best killer car movie I’ve ever seen but for £2.50 for the Blu Ray, I’m really quite happy that I’ve seen it. Not a big recommend from me but if you’re a fan of horror in general, it’s something comfortable and non-challenging to while away an hour and a half with. Definitely a good item if you’re doing an all-night, home video movie marathon and you want something you can half snooze to. Worth a quick look but don’t expect any signs of unsung genius.

Resident Evil: Retribution 3D

Vile Bodies Of Evil In War

Resident Evil: Retribution 3D 
2010 Germany/Canada
Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
Screening at UK cinemas now

Warning: Here be evil spoilers!

So here we are again. This is the fifth movie in what I think I’m right in saying is the most popular and lucrative series of films to be based on a computer game series ever. On the other hand, the original games are so overloaded with cultural references to various horror movie classics over the years, the most obvious being the large influence of George A. Romero’s zombie movies, that it’s sometimes hard to realise where the line between the two formats and their various homages blur, in actual fact.

What I am certain of, is that this film, while not as good as a lot of the others, is still a solid and respectable entry into the series. It’s walks a very risky tightrope between trying to correct things and undo things which have been added to as elements as the series has progressed, while at the same time driving those knitted together components to give the series new directions in which to continue. That it manages to do this actually quite well, while still managing to pack the flick with what is extensively wall to wall action, is somewhat good news.

The trailers for this promised the return of many characters who had died in previous episodes of the film series, which I’ve reviewed here (1, 2 & 3) and here (4). Although I had some idea in the back of my mind how this could work, the explanations for the reemergence of characters (played by Michelle Rodriguez, Colin Salmon, Sienna Guillory and Oded Fehr etc) who were sliced, diced, defected to the umbrella corporation or exploded, and so forth, in the previous movies... was actually better handled than I expected. It was good to see these faces again and, for anyone else who thinks they’ve figured out what the deal was here, all I’m going to confirm is, yes, these actors do have multiple roles in this installment.

We also get answers, of a sort, or a least a little more elaboration, of the non-sequitur of the giant sized hammer dude from the last movie and also this film goes some way to give more context to the brilliant “Tokyo in the rain” opening credits sequence of Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D. Interestingly, the sequence in this film where this opening was addressed has the added musical attraction of using the same composers' music for that sequence, layered in over the top of this one. The music in this one by Tomandandy (literally, a two man team of composers called, um, Tom and Andy) is quite serviceable, although I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did their last one. But congratulations to them because I think I’m right in saying that this is the first Resident Evil movie to retain a composer over from the previous film. So while this movie, as all of the sequels, feels like a reinvention of the last, it has the musical glue to keep continuity with the last one more, finally, and that’s helpful because this one starts off exactly where the cliffhanger ending from the last one left us.

Talking of which, the credits on this one are quite nice and also fairly arrogant in that they show a slowed down action sequence which runs backwards (in excellent 3D for a change, just like the last one) until it gets back to where we left it... we then have Mila Jovovich’s Alice character (yeah, this one continues with the slight allusions to Alice In Wonderland in it, with the Red Queen once again popping up as the computerised villain of the piece) recapping the previous installments... like she always does. We then catch back up to the last film again and see the action sequence ran back at full speed this time, but going forwards to propel us into the rest of the movie proper... it lasts maybe less than a minute this time, though.

The performances are all good again, (especially Michelle Rodriguez in the non-villainess version of her, um, character) and the action sequences all excellent and, it has to be said, unrelenting... although I did find some of the passages in the movie a little light on emotional context and thus a bit dull. This film also undoes, right at the end when they’re setting up the sixth film in the series, my main concern about the last one... by reintroducing the “T-virus” back into Alice’s system and returning her “super powers” to her... although one of Michelle Rodriguez’s characters also has those super powers, so she will obviously be back as a villain at some point, I suspect.

For a movie which reunites so many cast members, it seems unusual that Ali Larter was not in this one properly. I can’t quite remember, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t die at the end of the last one, did she? The absence of this character is conveniently circumvented right at the start when Alice is literally blown out of the action on the ship from the last movie and thus we don’t know the final fate of her companions. I’m pretty sure they will bring Larter back when they do the next one though... at least I hope they do.

Another and, frankly, much bigger loss to the series is that there’s no “Alice Versus Zombie Dogs” fight in this one. This is the first Resident Evil not to have a little scene where Alice fights off zombie dogs... and that kind of disappointed me to be honest. Their inclusion in the last three were so obviously forced in their because the fans love them... so it’s a shame they’re absent here.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about this one. If you’ve not seen the last one, even though this does have a handy recap, you’ll probably be lost in it and even if you aren’t, you won’t have any emotional set up to the characters. If, on the other hand, you’re already a fan of the series in general... well it’s not as good as some of them but, even so, it doesn’t let the side down and serves as a good set up, I assume, to whatever the next part of the arc is... which seems to look like it’ going to include some kind of war with flying dragonish looking things (I don’t think they were zombie Pterodactyls anyway... hard to tell). So, no worries if you’re into the Resident Evil movies already... this one’s still a hefty installment. You can watch without peril.