This Creature Is The Bringer Of Death: Look, If You Want To Make A Movie About A Mummy, Just Make A Movie About A Mummy
By TK | Trade News | April 4, 2012 | Comments ()
I have a sort of shameful fondness for 1999’s The Mummy. On any normal day, I’d tell director Stephen Sommers to go shit in his hat, but he has given me two films that are absolutely unquestionable guilty pleasures: Deep Rising and The Mummy. Oh, make no mistake — The Mummy is not good by any means. But it’s Brendan Frasier at his dashingly goofiest, Rachel Weisz being, well, Rachel Weisz, solid b-movie supporting actors like Oded Fehr, Arnold Voosloo and the wonderful Kevin J. O’Connor, some silly, fun effects, and just a light enough tone that I find it enjoyable to watch.
I sometimes hate myself afterwards, but I can say that about a lot of things. Including writing for you pack of sniveling jackholes.
Anyway, the film was quite successful and spawned two increasingly crappy sequels, plus a series of Scorpion King spin-offs (did you know there were three sequels to that? Hand to god). But it’s getting the reborquel treatment, this time courtesy of writer Jon Spaihts, who’s got a black listed script, Passengers, which is floating in development hell. Unfortunately, he also wrote the brutally awful Darkest Hour, so I don’t know how reliable he is. Because seriously, if there’s one thing science-fiction horror shouldn’t be, it’s boring, and that movie was fucking boring. ON the other hand, he also worked on Prometheus. What I’m basically saying is, I have no idea what to expect.
Anyway, the really strange thing is that they’re rebooting the movie at all. Spaights stated “I see it as the sort of opportunity I had with Prometheus: to go back to a franchise’s roots in dark, scary source material, and simultaneously open it up to an epic scale we haven’t seen before.”
The 1999 film was a remake of the 1932 film of the same name, which had the same basic plot — archeologists, mummy named Im-Ho-Tep, seeking his lost love (the idea was further adapted in the rather dreadful 2001 film The Mummy Returns which had pygmy mummies, a fact I’ve never quite recovered from). Yet the idea is a relatively simple one — there have got to be other mummification-related ideas out there. Why not just make another damn movie about mummies? Why make it about that particular mummy?
OK, I’m getting tired of writing the word mummy and it’s starting to weird me out a little. So, discuss in the comments, fools.
(via Slashfilm)
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