Cronin's "Mummy" continues where his overrated "Evil Dead" remake left off

 

For the past 27 years, there have been numerous movies about mummies. Stephen Sommers' franchise spawned a few sequels, injecting humor and light action into its dark supernatural storyline. Tom Cruise failed miserably in 2017, in his effort to resurrect the Dark Universe's bandaged corpse. And now, in 2026, we've been blessed with Lee Cronin's The Mummy (far be it for me to question, but has this dude actually earned the swag to have his name attached to a big budget picture's title?) a horror film that fuses The Exorcist and Evil Dead into an overlong, splattery, sometimes disgusting mess.

Right from the opening scene, the convoluted narrative already does too much too soon. A man is murdered by a mysterious object before we know what's what. Then, a young girl, Katie, is abducted. Her parents (Jack Reynor and Laia Costa) resort to an Egyptian detective (May Calamawy) to help them find her. The search ends up fruitless for eight years, when Katie is finally found inside a mysterious sarcophagus. She is alive, but isn't well. Not by a long shot.

The second hour of The Mummy involves excessive vomiting, peeled flesh, and strange fluids leaking out of people's wounds. I chuckled a few times at its over-the-top boldness, but mostly cringed at the repulsive violence that failed to scare me in the least. The villain - a dark, demonic force within the girl - is also too theatrical and performative, just like the demon in The Exorcist. I never cared for that so-called horror classic, but it was at least brazenly ahead of its time. Lee Cronin's The Mummy feels like a party taking place two decades past its thematic prime.

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"Exit 8" outlasts its welcome early on, and never recovers

 

Genki Kawamura's Exit 8 is a mind-fuck of a movie. This isn't necessarily a good thing. A ninety-plus minute surrealist ride into an underground subway's intricate hallways, in which its protagonist, played by Kazunari Ninomiya, struggles to locate the titular exit is intriguing for ten, maybe 15 minutes. After that, its repetitive nature, where he circles back around so many times that the only sensible option is to check one's watch, ad nauseam. 

Add to the mix the walking man (Yamato Kochi), a lost child (Naru Asanuma) and a woman whose infant's cries cause an impatient man to scream at her, and the result is a weak examination of a coward who learns that he should stand up to injustice, even when it's not directed at him personally.

Allegedly based on a video game, Exit 8 is bound to give foreign films (most notably the Asian ones) a bad name on the international stage. Those who had to pay to watch this theatrically surely must've demanded their money back. Either that, or they were as brain-dead as the filmmakers who thought this is a compelling cinematic narrative.

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