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Lee Cronin Looked At The Mummy Franchise And Said, “Let Me Make It Disgusting.” He Delivered!
- Sakshi D
- 57 minutes ago
- 3 min read
It’s disgusting, chaotic, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment
I came across a post claiming The Mummy was the most messed-up movie anyone had seen in theaters. I forwarded it to The Movie Junkie’s blog founder (shoutout to Yadav!).
His response was that he’d seen the trailers and would never watch it in any meaningful way. So I watched it, of course.
Lee Cronin, the director behind Evil Dead Rise, took one of the most underserved classic monsters and did something genuinely unexpected with it.
A journalist’s young daughter goes missing in Cairo. Eight years later, she’s found alive, sealed inside a sarcophagus. She comes home. Something is very, very wrong. What follows is two hours of Cronin gleefully destroying everyone in the room, including the audience.
TMJ Rating: 🍿🍿🍿🍿/5
What You Need to Know About Lee Cronin's The Mummy
Forget the Brendan Fraser films. Forget Tom Cruise jumping out of planes. This has almost nothing to do with the mummy as pop culture knows it.
The Egyptian mythology is the wrapper, but the contents are closer to The Exorcist meets Evil Dead Rise, with a family drama sandwiched in between. A possessed child terrorising her family, a detective subplot running parallel, and practical effects that will make you deeply reconsider your life choices.
Lee Cronin's The Mummy commits fully to being disgusting, and I respect that enormously. There’s a specific kind of horror that targets the body in deeply personal ways, the kind where you feel it in your own skin rather than just watching it on screen. The Mummy sits squarely in that category.
What Made It Work
Natalie Grace as the possessed Katie is the standout performance of the whole film. She goes to genuinely dark places with this role.
The sound design is doing heavy lifting throughout. There’s a clever trick with the score where beautiful emotional music slowly rots as the film progresses. The Egyptian cinematography is also stunning, with vast desert landscapes that make everything feel appropriately isolated and ancient.
The gore is exactly as advertised. Skin, fluids, bugs, things being ripped that should not be ripped. I was occasionally laughing because my body didn’t know how else to respond, which is exactly what good body horror should produce!
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What Didn’t Work As Well
The pacing drags in the middle. The film jumps between Cairo and Albuquerque repeatedly, and there are stretches where the momentum completely dies.
I also felt the family dynamic needed more investment than it gets. The dad is serviceable, but never compelling in the way the genre requires. Compare this to Evil Dead Rise, where the family relationships felt genuinely lived in. Here they’re fine, just not fine enough.
The runtime at 2h+ is about 15 minutes too long. The film finds a genuinely good ending point and then keeps going, over-explaining everything and dulling the impact.
The CGI in the climax also shows its budget in ways the practical effects never do. Jarring contrast.
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My Final Verdict
Messy, occasionally goofy, deeply gross, and exactly the right kind of unhinged for horror fans who actually want something that commits. It won’t win everyone over, and it doesn’t try to.
If you loved Evil Dead Rise, you already know whether you’re watching this.
Watch it with someone who can handle it. Do not watch it while eating.
Have you seen it yet? What did you think of that bug scene? Tell me in the comments.