SHOW ME: The Mummy (2017)

Who's The Mummy? Sofia Boutella as Ahmanet
Mummy's Love? Tom Cruise as Nick Morton
Where? Iraq, England, Egypt (in flashbacks)
How Long? 110 minutes

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I can't tell you how much I wanted to like this, to stand resolute in the face of the complete critical condemnation the latest iteration of The Mummy disappeared under upon its cinematic release.

But it really is that bad. It's a mess of unnecessarily repetitive exposition; over-the-top special effects sequences that are there only for inclusion in the trailers, serving no plot purpose whatsoever; a surfeit of bland characters; and a story of jumbled random encounters that made me think the writing team had simply transcribed a 13-year-old's Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Tom Cruise is the nominal protagonist, Nick Morton, an amoral and opportunistic treasure hunter who uses his military career as a smoke-screen to loot valuable artefacts from war zones. Yeah, a real stand-up guy we can all instantly emphasise with!

I think we're supposed to like him purely based on the fact he's played by Tom Cruise. Sadly, that isn't enough.

Using a map stolen from British archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), a character so one-dimensional she almost doesn't exist, Nick and his buddy Sergeant Chris Vail (Jake Johnson) stumble upon an unusual ancient Egyptian burial site in Iraq.

The sarcophagus of Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) is retrieved and loaded onto a cargo plane. En route to London, Chris is possessed by evil spirits and killed, returning as a ghost that only Nick can see in a Griffin Dunne in American Werewolf In London sort of deal.

The plane suffers the mother of all bird strikes and crashes in the English countryside.

Nick miraculously survives the experience without a scratch. It seems he has been "cursed" by Ahmanet to be her "Chosen One".

There's a chase sequence involving Nick and Jenny in an ambulance, escaping Ahmanet and her newly-raised zombie followers.

This ends with Ahmanet being captured and our "heroes" being whisked off to London to meet Jenny's boss, Dr Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe) of the Prodigium, a super-secret monster-hunting organisation located under the Natural History Museum.

The Prodigium want to dissect and study Ahmanet, but before they can she escapes and wreaks havoc on London, trying to recover a crucial gem hidden in a knight's tomb, recently unearthed by the Crossrail excavations.

Ahmanet needs the gem to complete a ritual that involves sacrificing her Chosen One (ie Nick) with a magical dagger that will then summon the Ancient Egyptian god Set.

Nick, however, comes up with a cunning plan to thwart Ahmanet's schemes... by doing exactly what she wants!

The Mummy is all over the place. There are traces of a good idea in there, but somewhere along the development process it clearly got away from the film-makers and took on a monstrous life of its own.

There's a definite whiff of the pulp genre's freewheeling disregard for logic in service of a rollickin' story here, but that style's bravura exuberance is replaced with generic corporate clichés.

A sterling example of film-making by committee, the fingerprints of the suits and money-men are all over The Mummy, leaving the unavoidable sensation that an eye-catching trailer was made first - to sell the concept to the general public - and then a film was assembled around that.

Outside of the unengaging leads, you have an antagonist with seemingly god-like powers, able to do pretty much whatever she wants - when it suits the plot - while conversely seeming impotent when it serves the plot.

For instance, one minute she's having to create zombie followers one at a time, by killing people and giving them a "kiss of life", and the next she can raise a horde out of thin air with just a wave of her hand.

There's so much material crammed in this 110 minute movie, clearly with the aim of laying the groundwork for Universal's proposed Dark Universe 'shared world' of monster movies, that even though the time flys by surprisingly quickly you can't help seeing large chunks that could easily have been left on the cutting room floor.

Russell Crowe is wasted as Dr Jekyll, whose outburst as Mr Hyde is - like so much here - pointless and Tom Cruise just phones it in, playing Tom Cruise at his least engaging. His performance is about as far away from his charming best as imaginable.

More an action-adventure funfair ride than a horror movie, the true horror of The Mummy is that anyone involved in releasing this into the wild ever thought it was a competent, coherent, movie in the first place.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Night House (2020)

Grieving widow Beth (Godzilla vs Kong's Rebecca Hall) returns to the lake house her husband, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), built for them, but can't shake the feeling she is not alone.

Desperate to understand why Owen killed himself, Beth starts to dig through his belongings as she spirals into a maelstrom of paranormal activity, lucid dreaming, and paranoia.

The more secrets about Owen she unearths, the more threatened Beth becomes by whatever is haunting her home.

Despite the best efforts of her friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg) and lovely neighbour, Mel (Vondie Curtis Hall), an elderly widower, to get her to cease her pursuit of "answers" and move on with her life, Beth is a woman on a mission.

Perhaps I watch too many movies, but there are some pretty hefty sign posts/red flags in the first act of The Night House that - knowing I was in for a ghost story from the get-go - pretty much spelled out what was going on.

Despite the nice, measured, slow burn I couldn't help but feel the movie may have shown its hand a bit early with the first of Owen's note books that Beth comes across, with its strange diagrams and cryptic notations.

There are plenty of clues to the underlying mystery throughout the film with many left ambiguous even as the central conceit is spelled out in a necessary info-dump.

Director David Bruckner delivers some really impressive camera tricks, particularly in his use of shadow entities, but also in a wonderfully disturbing sequence with an invisible ghost, as well as a striking, sudden, switch of POV as Beth's dreams overlap with her reality.

He also has an uncanny knack of building to what you expect to be a jump scare, but then taking the scene in a different direction, which only accentuates the creepiness of the situation.

Even the story's ultimate resolution is atypical for this style of predominantly threatening and violent ghost story.

Unfortunately, there is an inescapable sense that the film doesn't do enough with some of its more intriguing elements, such as the lake itself, the "other house" (that exists in different forms in dreams and reality), Beth's real connection with the entity, the "mirror world" etc

While occasionally evoking comparisons with other modern ghost stories, from Twin Peaks to Final Destination, The Night House certainly has a style all of its own.

Sometimes this obfuscates the narrative a bit too much, but generally it creates something that is truly memorable - if only for some of its clever imagery, at the expense of its plot.

However, as intriguing and enthralling as Brucker's direction of Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski's script is, The Night House truly belongs to Rebecca Hall, whose central performance as Beth dominates this 107-minute movie.

She is in almost every scene, often alone, and wholly convinces us of Beth's heartache, despair, deterioration, confusion, anger, and fear. 

Ultimately, The Night House feels a bit patchy, but it's certainly unnerving viewing and never resorts to cheap tricks when trying to elicit a reaction from its audience.

SHOW ME: Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955)

Who's The Mummy? Eddie Parker as Klaris
Mummy's Love? n/a - no romantic sub-plot
Where? Egypt
How Long? 79 minutes

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello are a pair of American chancers stuck in Egypt looking to earn a quick buck and passage back to the States. They learn of Dr Gustav Zoomer's (Kurt Katch) discovery of the mummy of Klaris and his desire to hire a couple of men to escort his precious cargo back to the United States.

Marie Windsor as Madame Rontru

However, before they can talk to him about the job opportunity, the archaeologist is murdered and Abbott & Costello find themselves caught between the machinations of a group of criminals, fronted by the exotic Madame Rontru (Marie Windsor), and Klaris-worshipping cultists, led by led by Semu (Richard Deacon).

Our hapless heroes come into possession of a cursed amulet, which Costello finds among the dead doctor's possessions. This amulet is the key to the location of the treasure-packed tomb of Princess Ara, which the living mummy Klaris is supposed to guard.

Sadly, Abbott & Costello's 1950's slapstick shtick hasn't aged well - growing tiresome quite quickly - and the comedy of misdirection, misunderstanding, and mistaken identity has frayed round the edges worse than the mummy's bandages.

There's a restaurant routine where Bud and Lou are trying to pass off the cursed amulet to each other that comes across as really forced and a later serving of rapid-fire wordplay around "pick" and "shovel" only reminds us how brilliant Who's On First? was.

And pity poor Eddie Parker as Klaris, stumbling around like a man in a baggy onesie, a victim of the "too slow to be scary" editorial decision that blighted several earlier mummy movies.

While it's only 79 minutes long, but the limply-scripted Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy seems much longer, almost interminable at times.

Bizarrely, although their characters are supposedly called Pete Patterson and Freddie Franklin, respectively, Abbott and Costello refer to each other as Abbott and Costello throughout the film.

This was the last movie they made with Universal, and I can't help feeling that their heart wasn't in it.

I'll admit I know next-to-nothing about Abbott & Costello, so that's pure baseless speculation on my part but as a comedy-horror Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy is neither terrifying or particularly amusing.

Witness The Ultimate Hunt Next Month

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023)

Socially-awkward Lennon (Krypton and Barbarian's Georgina Campbell) lands a position as a backcountry ranger in the (fictional) Arvores National Park.

The massive park is known for the large number of people who go missing there, including Lennon's sister when they were youngsters.

Lennon is determined to find out what is really going on in the dark and creepy liminal spaces of the heavily forested park, but encounters a conspiracy of silence among her work colleagues.

Head-strong and determined to march to the beat of her own drum, Lennon disobeys a direct order during a hunt for a missing person (who she actually ends up rescuing, thus attracting the ire of whatever is lurking in the darkness) and finds herself on five days notice.

It is during these final days of her first season in the park that things start to get really strange.

I had high hopes that Lovely, Dark, and Deep would be a solid blend of two of my favourite horror sub-genres: rural horror and cosmic horror, but ultimately it falls into a well-trodden formula seen in so many similar movies.

While it's thankfully not as grating as a pretentious Ben Wheatley rural horror outing, early Blair Witch and Picnic at Hanging Rock vibes soon give way to obtuse, clichéd and random imagery. 

There's an overly-long nightmare sequence that has Lynchian aspirations, and is clearly meant to be the closest we'll get to an explanation of events, but much of it ultimately comes off as being weird for weird's sake.

The film, written and directed by Teresa Sutherland (who wrote the far-superior The Wind) clearly has good intentions; there's an interesting idea buried in there but as a story it's poorly told.

The cycle of sacrifice to the hungry and unknowable spirits that inhabit the woods is a really novel concept, but is hidden among a lot of unnecessary distraction padding out the 87-minute run time. 

Clearly there isn't enough of the main plot, as written, to satisfactorily fill the movie's duration and so atmospheric artistry is called upon to inflate what is there.

On one hand there actually was much to admire in Lovely, Dark, and Deep but on the other was the inescapable fact that it was thin fare, reminiscent of so many other movies - both better and worse.

SHOW ME: The Mummy's Curse (1944)

Who's The Mummy? Lon Chaney as Kharis
Mummy's Love? Virginia Christine as Princess Ananka
Where? Louisiana, Egypt (in flashbacks)
How Long? 60 minutes

Bizarrely, while following on from the events of The Mummy's Ghost, the New England swamp that Kharis carried his beloved into at the end of the earlier movie has now moved to Louisiana... without any explanation.

Which is odd because The Mummy's Curse not only features the usual flashback retelling of the mummy's origin but also features archaeologists from the Scripps Museum (as last time) and references to the previous efforts to return Kharis and Princess Ananka to Egypt.

Work to drain the swamp is being held up by superstitious workmen, fearful of the curse of the mummy after he disappeared there 25 years earlier (yes, another massive time jump as well).

Never fear though as Dr James Halsey (Dennis Moore) and Dr Ilzor Zandaab (Peter Coe), from the Scripps Museum, arrive to retrieve the bodies of Kharis and Ananka.

Hiding in plain sight, Zandaab is actually the latest High Priest of Arkam with his own designs on the mummy, assisted by the slimy Ragheb (Martin Kosleck), one of the work crew who is also a disciple of Arkam.

Virginia Christine

The story takes an interesting twist when a bulldozer disturbs the resting place of the mummy of Ananka (Virginia Christine), which rises from the swamp and eventually, after bathing, reveals itself to be a very attractive woman.

Ananka's memory is a bit hazy, but she is taken by Cajun Joe (Kurt Katch) to the nearby café run by Tante Berthe (Ann Codee). Unfortunately, Kharis lumbers in and kills Berthe as Ananka runs away.

The lovely Ananka is later found by the side of the road by Dr Halsey and Betty Walsh (Kay Harding), the secretary of the work crew and niece of Pat Walsh (Addison Richards), head of the swamp clearance project.

There's a hysterically funny sequence as Kharis lumbers slowly towards Betty, then Dr Halsey's car, but they manage to get away with Ananka, totally oblivious to the presence of the mummy.

In their care, Ananka starts to come to her senses, and is later able to help Dr Halsey with his research, seemingly possessing an in-depth knowledge of Ancient Egypt.

Kharis, again, comes for Ananka, whisking her away to a nearby ruined monastery, where Zandaab has set up his base of operations.

Betty, looking for the missing woman, is lured to the monastery by Ragheb, who tries to force himself on her, but is interrupted by Zandaab, who ends up dead in the ensuing melee.

Halsey then turns up and tackles Ragheb, until Kharis intervenes, driven by Ragheb's betrayal of his oath. The two former allies fight until Kharis brings down the walls and ceiling of the monastery on them!

Meanwhile, too late to save the missing woman they had been looking for, Halsey, Betty, and the rest of the mob (there's always a mob) from the work site find the mummified remains of Ananka in an adjoining room.

The Mummy's Curse was the last outing for Lon Chaney Jnr in the monster role and the last 'proper' mummy movie from Universal for quite some time.

Strange plot decisions aside, the film's a mix of interesting ideas (bringing Ananka to life, presumably in the rejuvenated body of Amina Mansori from The Mummy's Ghost, for instance) and over-the-top, melodramatic, hammy, acting (sadly the beautiful Virginia Christine is rather prone to this).

It's also retreading very familiar ground - even with the unexplained location switch - of evil cult priests trying to return Kharis and Ananka to Egypt, so it's easy to see why Universal didn't bother to keep the franchise alive any longer.

The trouble with Kharis, once you accept the the horror of his having been buried alive and then kept alive by tana leaves, is that he is painfully slow, and has only one functioning hand (his right arm has remained largely immobile through all the movies to date, except when he's needed to carry someone).

As clearly demonstrated in the scene with Dr Halsey's car, unless Kharis can back his prey into a corner or paralyse them with fear, as presented, he isn't really much of a threat anymore.

The Mummy wouldn't return for 11 years and then it was in the comedy Abbot & Costello Meet The Mummy.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Watched (2024)

The trailer above, which I saw early last year, got me interested in seeing The Watched (aka The Watchers) and so I had been on the lookout for it ever since.

It finally arrived in Sky Cinema (in the UK), and at first I thought it was delivering on the potential suggested by the teaser trailer.

Dakota Fanning is Mina, a troubled American woman who works in a rare pet store in Galway, and gets lost in an unmapped wood while driving across Ireland to deliver a golden parrot (who she names Darwin) to a client.

Her car breaks down and she finds herself turned round and confused while searching for assistance, eventually being discovered by a woman called Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), who is hiding out in a strange building with a couple of other lost souls, Ciara (Lovely, Dark and Deep's Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan).

Mina quickly discovers that the mysterious woods are home to enigmatic, shapeshifting, supernatural monsters who are holding these people 'prisoner', governed by a strict set of rules, while they study them.

There are attempts to give all this spam-in-a-cabin fodder interesting backstories, but it doesn't really pay off or add much to the drama.

While the quartet are still zoo specimens for "the Watchers", The Watched has strong puzzle box elements - evoking FROM, Lost, and Jordan Peele's Us.

But then it segues rather conveniently into a (comparatively easy) escape sequence and a return to 'normality' that drags on purely just to seed in more - very obvious - plot twists.

There's an unavoidable feeling that a great mythology was dreamed up for the central monsters of the piece, but then a decent story couldn't really be hammered out to contain it. So, instead, we just get streams and streams of exposition as Mina moves from point A to point B, clicks on the right item, gets an info dump and moves on to point C.

While getting lost in scary, magical woods is a trope as old as storytelling, initially The Watched, written and directed by Ishana Shyamalan (daughter of M Night Shyamalan, who is a producer on this project), appeared to taking an interesting (if, probably not wholly original) approach to the subject matter.

Ultimately though it just got bogged down in a mundane and protracted resolution to a mediocre storyline.

SHOW ME: The Mummy's Ghost (1944)

Who's The Mummy? Lon Chaney as Kharis
Mummy's Love? Ramsay Ames as Amina Mansori/Ananka
Where? Egypt, America (Mapleton)
How Long? 60 minutes

In Egypt, the ageing High Priest of Arkam (Karnak in the previous films), tasks Yousef Bey (John Carradine) with retrieving the living mummy Kharis (who has somehow survived the conflagration at the end of the last movie) and the body of Princess Ananka.

However, back in the States, at a university in Mapleton, Massachusetts, the mummy's rampage is being taught as fact by Professor Matthew Norman (Frank Reicher), who later recreates the tana leaves recipe and accidentally summons Kharis... who breaks his neck!

Yousef Bey arrives in town just as the authorities are whipping up the mob for another mummy hunt, so he contacts Kharis and they head to the Scripps Museum where Ananka's mummified corpse is on display.

Unexpectedly, when Kharis goes to remove Ananka's body from its sarcophagus, it disintegrates because her soul has left it and transferred itself to the nearest young Egyptian woman, Amina Mansori (Ramsay Ames), girlfriend of the odious and condescending student Tom Hervey (Robert Lowery).

As a witness to Professor Norman's murder, she's already been told not to leave town, but Tom knows better and has plans to take her to his family in New York for some rest and recuperation.

Following up on the break-in (and murder of a guard) at the museum, as well as the professor's death, big city police inspector Walgreen (Barton MacLane) hits on the idea of - with the assistance of the museum's Dr Ayad (Lester Sharp) - of luring the mummy back to Professor Norman's house, with the tana leaves concoction, and trapping it in a ten foot pit!

But Kharis and Bey have other ideas, and kidnap Amina Mansori.

Unfortunately, once again, as we've seen with frightening regularity in these films, the priest ends up falling for Amina and decides, instead of returning her to Egypt as he was supposed to, that he's going to use the magical leaves to grant both her and him eternal life so they can run away together (not that she ever consents to any of this nonsense).

Kharis isn't best pleased with this turn of events and kills Bey, before making off towards nearby swampland with Amina's unconscious - and rapidly ageing - body, pursued by a mob of locals led by Tom Hervey and the police.

Events then take an unexpectedly dark turn as the film dives headlong into a messed up, nihilistic ending with the mob standing impotently by as Kharis (still with Amina's body, now a grey-haired husk) walks into the swamp.

Although stricken with some am-dram-level acting (Robert Lowery, I'm looking at you in particular) as well as a penchant for recycling plenty of plot points from previous Mummy movies, The Mummy's Ghost stands out for its unremittingly bleak ending.

How did Kharis survive the fire at the end of The Mummy's Tomb? Who knows? Magic reasons, probably.

It's also the slimmest of justifications for calling this film The Mummy's "Ghost", but then all the adventures after the original seem to have been gifted with totally random - and meaningless - names.

It's best not to overthink it.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Baskin (2015)

If you're looking for a memorable horror movie that feels like it was based on an HP Lovecraft story, but wasn't, then look no further than surreal Turkish splatterfest Baskin.

A generally unlikable, thuggish, group of police officers respond to a call for back-up in a rural area with a bad reputation.

Among the five-man team is Arda (Görkem Kasal), the newest recruit and the ward of the chief Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu).

As the freshest face in the unit, Arda has yet to be ground down, or corrupted, by the obviously hard work the men do.

Unfortunately on the way to the emergency, their van crashes.

The squad has to ask for directions from a strange group of "frog-hunters" they find camped at the edge of the lake their van ended up in.

A quick jaunt through the woods brings them to an abandoned Ottoman Empire-era police station.

The building appears to have been taken over by squatters, who have vandalised it with it peculiar graffiti and left evidence of all kinds of obscenities.

But it's only really as they descend into the lower levels of the building that the true horror of the building's current inhabitants becomes clear.

And the police officers soon find themselves in the clutches of a  terrifying, possibly sub-human, cult.

While Görkem Kasal's Arda is the nominal star of the story, the stand-out performance has to be the amazing Mehmet Cerrahoglu as the cult leader Baba (The Father).

Baba: The Father

A Turkish Clint Howard, Cerrahoglu's incredibly rare skin condition gives him a unique physical appearance that he draws amazing power from here in his first feature film role.

Forget all the splatterpunk Grand Guignol for a moment, Baba is the iconic image of Baskin that will endure.

Baskin (Turkish for 'Raid') was the first full-length movie from Can Evrenol, an extrapolation of his 11-minute short of the same name (which featured several of the same actors, including the magnificent Mehmet Cerrahoglu).

Buoyed along by a thumping, Carpenteresque, score, Baskin is Lovecraftian cosmic horror meets Hellraiser by way of The Void, Blair Witch, The Last Shift, In The Mouth Of Madness, and - for for better or for worse - Twin Peaks: The Return.

Even though it predates David Lynch's most recent visit to Twin Peaks, there's a key scene in Baskin - as well as its ending - that share important thematic, and stylistic, similarities and, I think, will ultimately decide whether you rate Evrenol's surreal shocker or not.

One thing I felt after viewing Baskin is that it is more of an experience than a coherent narrative. It's main purpose is to draw the audience into the mind-boggling ordeals that the policemen go through, rather than explaining too much or attaching it all to a traditional story structure.

Be warned, things do go a bit torture porn once the coppers are captured, but, for me, it's all about intent.

This isn't a bunch of wealthy businessmen torturing 'innocents' for shits and giggles, but an evil cult trying to transform its "chosen one" through arcane rituals handed down from their unknowable ancient deities.

Although the truly weird stuff doesn't start until the half-way mark of this 96-minute film, the pacing and rhythm are perfect so you're drawn in from the get-go, as the tension escalates and you try to figure out what the hell's going on.

Throughout Baskin there's talk about dreams (and dreams within dreams) and one - almost heavy-handed - shot of Arda nodding off in the van before everything goes sideways that I thought was the M. Night Shyamalan moment when the "it's-all-a-dream" twist was given away.

But, and I know some of you may consider this a spoiler, that's not what's going on. If it had all been a dream I would have been very annoyed and not nearly as smitten as I am by this flawed gem.

Much of Baskin has a dream-like nature, and dream-logic to its flow, but - as far as I'm concerned - what was happening to the protagonists was very real.

Having sat through much of the movie inner-monologuing "don't be a dream, don't be a dream", I'm now looking forward to going back and watching it again, comfortable in the knowledge that Baskin avoids that cop out (pun intended).

It is, however, genuinely the stuff of nightmares.