In retrospect, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy was maybe not the best title Atomic Monster and Blumhouse could’ve gone with. While Lee Cronin, who also made Evil Dead Rise, is a talented director, he’s not exactly well-known enough to have his name attached to the title as a way to draw in audiences. It had the unfortunate effect of making the movie something of a punch line even before it hit theaters, and catty rumors about producer James Wan storming out of a test screening (which Cronin said were false) circulated. Plus, there was that whole “this ain’t the Brendan Fraser Mummy” confusion, especially after the fourth movie in that franchise was announced, which Blumhouse decided to just go ahead and lean into wholeheartedly. However, a few months have passed. There’s some distance from all that, and now Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has its HBO Max streaming date set: July 3. While we had mixed feelings about the movie’s plot—it’s all a bit too familiar, with a lot of Exorcist echoes in its spooky-kid possession narrative—it’s definitely worth checking out on the small screen.
That goes double if you’re a gore connoisseur; creative splatter is one of Cronin’s signature moves, and he deploys it perfectly in his Mummy take. A funeral scene involving a corpse’s false teeth is particularly gruesome, though not quite as traumatizing as that cheese-grater situation in Evil Dead Rise.
