it’s lee cronin’s willy wonka’s bram stoker’s akira kurosawa’s the mummy

i have been meaning, these past few weeks, to write about the movie that insists on referring to itself as lee cronin’s the mummy (2026). the fact that i have, to this point, failed to do so, is something you can mostly put down to unending book travel, but perhaps also to the fact that to succeed would have required me to acknowledge that someone allowed a movie with a title as simultaneously dumb and self-aggrandising as lee cronin’s the mummy to be made, advertised and shown in cinemas, and sometimes in writing you really do have to ask yourself whether you want to live in the world you’re choosing to depict.

more urgent than my need to see or respond to lee cronin’s the mummy is my need to see the movie hokum (2026), or indeed my need to see the movie backrooms (2026), or my need to see the movie obsession (2026), but as it stands i’ve been travelling for so long that i no longer know where i am or what my name is and i haven’t seen anything new in so long that i’m starting to consider turning this substack into a platform where i rank the superhunks, so the fact that i have anything in the tank at all will have to do until further notice.

lee cronin’s the mummy is not, i should point out now, any good. nor was i, were you, or i’m sure was anyone involved in the direction, creation or distribution of lee cronin’s the mummy expecting it to be good, but where it is bad, it is bad in creative and ridiculous new ways involving small children pulling out their own teeth and drinking embalming fluid and serial doyenne of the craft of getting trapped in things jack reynor once again getting trapped in something, so i cannot exactly argue that its badness is down to a lack of effort.

positioning itself predominantly as a sort of evil dead meets the failed dark universe franchise, by way of racism, lee cronin’s the mummy used the majority of its fairly extensive ad campaign to pose the tantalising question: “what happened to katie?”. the answer, you’ll be shocked to hear, is “she became lee cronin’s the mummy”. the fact the this is made quite obvious by the posters, all of which depict katie in the act of being lee cronin’s the mummy, is more or less demonstrative of where this movie falls on the scale of thinking about things very hard. over the course of lee cronin’s the mummy, you will hear several times from characters wondering what on earth has happened to katie, and then katie will do something like peel her own skin off or levitate or throw her grandmother out of the window to be eaten by coyotes, and you’ll be like idk man i think she’s become lee cronin’s the mummy, and then another character will be like i guess we need to do some more family therapy, and you’ll be like ok, well, i’ll see myself out.

that lee cronin’s the mummy is a stupid movie is obviously barely a fact you need me to elucidate for you. that it is chronically, brain-numbingly racist is also, i’m sure, not a shock. operating at around the level of conservatism appropriate for the current timbre of most mainstream horror, the outlandishly elongated prologue to lee cronin’s the mummy introduces us to a wholesome american family living in egypt, only for their beautiful child to be kidnapped by a deranged egyptian nectarine farmer for obviously mummy-related purposes and kept in a tomb for several years. the nice american family move back to america, have another child, and actually appear to be extremely fine about all this until their now mummified daughter is suddenly returned to then, setting off a wildly convoluted and tonally confused series of interlocking plotlines in which the wholesome american family attempt to cope with their newly repatriated daughter biting her grandmother’s ears off and pissing on things, whilst a girlbossy egyptian detective tries to discover what she can about katie’s captors, mostly via the medium of breaking and entering and shooting civilians in the chest. the fact that there is absolutely no need at all for this secondary plot strand, because we already know what has happened and do not need it acted out for us, is another thing that you barely need me to explain to you. i’m more than usually certain that what happened here was that lee cronin saw the movie longlegs (2024) once, on a plane, and thought sure ok let’s string the arse out of this, and i cannot even entirely complain because the detective, played by staggeringly hot egyptian-palestinian actor may calamawy, is the only charismatic person in the movie, but it still doesn’t work, and it’s stupid.

i should note, as it has thus far failed to come up, that this movie is over two hours long. it is so long that at various points i looked towards my friend avery who had come to see the movie with me in a cinema unrelieved by any other patrons barring exactly one man sitting right in front of us and thought of asking her what year it was. it is so long that at various points, the one other man in the cinema got up and left the room, and i thought oh he’s finally had enough, only then he came back again and it turned out he had just been going out for smoke breaks and was coming back on purpose. it is so long that by the time it ended i had fully forgotten what had even prompted us to attend in the first place, or indeed that the man at the ticket desk had looked at the movie we intended to see and gone “ooooh good luck”, which was a deranged thing to say as lee cronin’s the mummy is not only two hours long but also painfully, almost artistically, unscary.

(i suppose this is the problem with the evil dead of it all. the evil dead franchise, i would argue, works in the main because it is funny, and gross, and not because it is particularly scary, and so to move most of these trappings lock stock and barrel across to another property, whilst mostly jettisoning the camp, is really just a recipe for a movie that is quite gross and quite boring and very very long.)

and then, again, there’s the title. much in the manner of willy wonka & the chocolate factory (1971), famously named because roald dahl hated it so much that he requested the title distance itself from the source material, or bram stoker’s dracula (1992), which often gives off the distinct impression that francis ford coppola is blaming his weirdest excesses on somebody else, there is a strange note of disavowal to lee cronin’s the mummy. in a much as it seems to claim a sort of demented auteur ownership – a la wes craven’s new nightmare (1994) in which wes craven plays himself having a sort of sponsored mental breakdown whilst freddy krueger runs around knocking over the chairs - there is also a bizarre distancing effect achieved by this kind of title. one has to imagine reginald leborg, noted slop director of the universal era rising from the grave and knocking on lee cronin’s door in the middle of night with a writ like no can you make it extremely clear to people that this wasn’t my idea. this isn’t the mummy, this is lee cronin’s the mummy, which means that by all accounts it really isn’t the mummy at all. more times that one can really countenance, as the movie drags on and on, you do find yourself thinking did lon chaney jr really die for this.

anyway, i don’t intend to explain everything that happens in lee cronin’s the mummy, because i will not live long enough, so instead, here are some things that happened in lee cronin’s the mummy that made me think if i were lee cronin (of lee cronin’s the mummy fame) i would have taken my name off the movie lee cronin’s the mummy, thereby rendering it simply the mummy:

- when jack reynor first loses his daughter katie in an egyptian sandstorm and runs around looking for her with his eyes wide open and you’re like my guy you’re going to need new corneas

- when we are introduced to two fairly compelling-seeming egyptologists who find the tomb containing the mummified katie and we’re like ok better get ready to care about some characters, and then we simply never see then again

- when jack reynor and his wife whose name i cannot remember bring the mummified katie home and she proceeds to act out in all sorts of mildly disgusting ways and lose long strips of her skin, and the mother is like no i must keep her here because of motherhood and jack reynor is like well

- when mummified katie i think licks her sister’s toes?

- when jack reynor visits some guy at the University of Artificial Desert to ask him what’s going on with katie and the guy’s like “show me those egyptian wrappings – oh this language is ancient hieratic…which i speak”

- when the guy from the University of Artificial Desert takes jack reynor to his office and is like “i know which demon has possessed your mummy child katie” and the music swells ominously and then he’s like “he sows….family division” and i’m like well i can do that by being gay can’t you just tell us he’s the king of hell or that he’s going to bring about the apocalypse or something.

- when the demon-infested katie proceeds not so much to sow family division as to cause one child in the family to pull out all her own teeth whilst another bashes his head repeatedly against a pole, which i would say is weaksauce compared to the psychological torment we were promised, have you people never heard of the demon paimon.

- when my friend avery texted me after the movie like “why the fuck was the american portion of this movie set in alberquerque” and i was like idk is it because it looks like a desert and then she was like “god do you think it’s so they had to include some spanish characters and people couldn’t accuse them of being racist” and i was like god you’re right.

i’ll tell you what’s good, though, is when the hot detective woman gets stabbed through the throat and has to talk by sticking her fingers into her own voicebox. i’d watch two hours of lee cronin’s artificially activated voicebox any day of the week.