Imhotep
Rises Again.
There is so little to say about The
Mummy (1999), directed by Stephen Sommers that to write on
it is almost like hunting a gnat with an elephant gun. What
significance this film, like so many new releases, has in and of
itself is negligible; its interest lies in its collateral
relations to current and older movie genres and to the lineage of Mummy pictures. Therefore, for anyone who just wants a
straightforward yea-or-nay, is it worth seeing assessment, I here
offer a capsule review before looking into these other questions.
The Mummy is
an entertaining adventure film more than a horror film--no one
should go to it expecting to see a remake of the 1932 original,
although it does borrow from its predecessor in some interesting
ways.
The movie is advertised as
"This Summer's First Special Effects Event!" and the
effects by Industrial Light and Magic are suitably impressive,
particularly a sandstorm that pursues the hero and his cohorts in
a biplane and that takes on the shape of Imhotep. Handsomely
photographed by Adrian Biddle, The Mummy has a striking
look, emphasizing brown, black, and gold tones, and employing
low-key lighting in many sequences--particularly those which take
place underneath the necropolis of Hamunaptra--to create an
appropriately ominous atmosphere. The cinematography is abetted
by the production design of Allan Cameron, whose sets cover a
wide range of periods from the ancient Egypt of the prologue
which explains how Imhotep came to be mummified alive to the
ruins of Hamunaptra and the Anglicized Egypt of the 1920's. The
film is also well served by Jerry Goldsmith's score--every note
of which was faithfully rendered by the Sony Dynamic Digital
Sound system--and by the capable editing of Bob Ducsay, which
keeps the viewer on the edge of his or her seat throughout The
Mummy's two hour plus length.
As the American adventurer, Rick O'Connell,
Brendan Fraser gives a solidly athletic performance and Rachel
Weisz is quite attractive as the aspiring Egyptologist, Evelyn,
the eventual object of his affections. But none of the performers are
very well served by Sommers' script--The Mummy's weakest point--especially not Arnold Vosloo,
who plays Imhotep. The first
picture did not have such a strong cast, although Zita Johann as
Helen Grosvenor made quite a striking reincarnation of
Anck-es-en-Amon, Bramwell Fletcher had a memorable scene as Ralph
Norton, the young British archaeologist who goes mad, and Edward
Van Sloan was his usual reliable self as the occultist, Professor
Muller. However, the picture gave Boris Karloff what may have
been his best horror vehicle ever.
As Imhotep/Ardath Bey, Karloff
absolutely carried the 1932 Mummy
with as powerful an incarnation of
evil as Bela Lugosi's Count in Dracula.
Poor Vosloo, on
the other hand, has to babble in what I take to be ancient
Egyptian when he first shows up on screen--babble because at that
point in the story he is only a decomposed corpse--and he only
has a handful of lines later in his resuscitated form. Nor does
the script do much for the other performers. Brendan Fraser gets
some funny one-liners which he delivers quite well but Evelyn's
unscrupulous brother Johnny (John Hannah) and the even more
unscrupulous Egyptian guide Beni (Kevin J. O'Connor) do little
more than behave badly on every possible occasion. That said, it
remains to examine some more interesting if more tangential
issues, and like good archaeologists it behooves us to start from
the surface and dig deeper, proceeding with care
1)
Excavating The Mummy.
Mummy movies have a surprisingly long ancestry; the Internet
Movie Database lists
titles such as The Mummy and the Cowpuncher, The
Egyptian Mummy, as well as The Mummy and the Hummingbird,
dating from 1912, 1914, and 1915 respectively. There is even a
picture directed by Ernst Lubitsch in 1918, called The Eyes of
the Mummy Ma. (According to a fairly sarcastic user's comment
in the IMDb entry on the title, one which gives quite a thorough
synopsis of the plot, there is no mummy in the movie.) But the 1999 Mummy is a descendent of the line that commenced in
1932, although the question of the possible influence of older
films on the Ur-Mummy remains a tantalizing one. (Henceforth, the two films will be identified as Mummy
1 and Mummy 2, and their respective monsters as
Imhotep 1 and Imhotep 2.)
Mummy 1 was directed by the
legendary cinematographer Karl Freund who had previously
distinguished himself by photographing Tod Browning's Dracula.
(There is even speculation, discussed by David J. Skal in The
Monster Show and by Skal and Elias Savada in Dark Carnival,
their biography of Browning, that Freund may have directed some
scenes in Dracula.) A few years later, in 1935, working at
MGM Freund made another horror film, Mad Love, starring
Peter Lorre--a remake of Robert Wiene's 1925 silent film The
Hands of Orlac--which is quite good, but Freund's reputation
as a director would certainly have to rest on Mummy 1.
The
screenplay for this film was written by John Balderston--who had,
of course, had previously rendered the same service for Dracula--and
based upon a story by Nina Wilcox Putnam, and Richard Schayer.
While Putnam ended up writing inspirational pieces for Reader's
Digest, Schayer is an altogether more interesting if shadowy
figure, like John Colton, who also worked on the screenplay for
W.S. Van Dyke's Trader Horn (1931) and headed Universal's
story department at the time Frankenstein was being
prepped.
There is thus a legitimate
Mummy
line--why not in a horror film cycle which pays so much attention
to royal blood?--one which is made up of four dynasties, so to
speak. The first of these had no immediate descendents but in
1940 Universal commenced a new dynasty, reprising the figure of
the Mummy who is still pursuing his dead love centuries later but
on a somewhat different basis. The second dynasty, which had four members,
only lasted until 1944. An English addition came out in 1959, but
it was also without issue, so Mummy 2 is the newest
successor to the line. Whether or not it will be a fruitful one
is not yet clear. However, since studios today are as hungry for
a profitable series as they were in the 1930's and '40's, the
possibility of an heir seems a definite likelihood.
Unless
Mummy 2 is totally eclipsed by the orient sun of George
Lucas' The Phantom Menace, it promises to do exceptionally
well at the box office, which bodes auspiciously for a new
dynasty. As this brief survey
should make clear, the continuity of the line has been constantly
interrupted--there is nothing like the series of links however
twisted which joined the various Universal Frankenstein
productions to one another-- which already makes the status of
the latest arrival problematic.
2) Mummy Genres.
I think every review of Mummy 2 I have seen
so far has emphasized its indebtedness to Steven Spielberg's
Indiana Jones pictures--which is quite right. What the reviews
overlook is that all these pictures are in turn the offspring of
older action and adventure pictures such as Van Dyke's Trader
Horn and Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), Merian C. Cooper
and Enest Schoedsack's King Kong (1933) and Cooper,
Schoedsack and Lothar Mendes' Four Feathers (1929)--which
had already been filmed twice before, in 1915 and 1921--and
Herbert Brenon's Beau Geste (1926) as well as innumerable
serials.
Like the Indiana Jones films,
Mummy 2 follows the
conventions of the cliffhanger but those conventions go back to
the beginnings of commercial movie production and beyond there to
the popular culture--dime novels and melodramas--late nineteenth
century popular culture. At its best, Mummy 2, like Raiders
of the Lost Ark, resembles a classy revision of those older
films, one which is by no means unworthy of them.
But this is
hardly the end of Mummy 2's genre questions, since the
older action-adventure genre has been inflected by some
distinctly recent innovations in the American cinema. The most
easily recognizable of these is the more drastic version of the
disaster genre, the apocalyptic movie, very much in evidence last
summer. From the very beginning of Mummy
2, the audience
is informed that Imhotep's return to life will threaten the
safety of the human race, and no sooner does he return than the
Ten Plagues of Egypt (Exodus: 7-12) break loose on an
unsuspecting world. But there is worse to come when Imhotep
succeeds in gathering about him a mob of followers who do his
every bidding and riot through downtown Cairo.
The other innovation,
far less easy to nail down, is not a genre but a thematic
convention of numerous horror films made in the last twenty
years, the theme of paranoid fantasies about the human
body--bodies which are easily dismembered or which deliquesce to
reveal all kinds of abominable beings or unmentionable toxic
substances inside. Although the
locus classicus of these fantasies is Alien with its scene
in which the nascent alien emerges from the body of Kane (John
Hurt), they have played a far more prominent role in the horror
genre, especially in the pictures of David Cronenberg--one of my
least favorite of all directors--whose stock in trade they are,
rather like a child who specializes in picking his nose in front
of grownups.
Needless to say, Mummy 2 plays this card
for all it's worth. Imhotep 2--who only appears swathed in the
prologue as he is being wrapped alive--returns to life as a
decomposing cadaver, whose flesh has been devoured by carnivorous
scarabs buried with him, and who must reconstruct his body from
the parts he steals from others. Nor does the film stop there,
throwing in scenes in which scarabs burrow under the skin of
their victims, shots of Imhotep 2's still liquid tissue before he
is completely restored, and at the end a whole host of more or
less rotting priests that he has called back to life to aid him.
The horror here is grossly physical--ultimately of a total loss
of identity in a protozoic ooze like the one to which Imhotep 2
returns at the conclusion. The words found by Rick and Evelyn
which the still-living Imhotep 2 had scratched in his
sarcophagus, "death is just the beginning," could well
serve as an epigraph for the movie.
More than anything else,
these fantasies of apocalypse and deliquescence indicate the
distance of Mummy 2's world from that of the 1932
one. The older film took its
supernatural machinery quite seriously. Imhotep 1 was a demon
with genuinely supernatural powers, capable of killing at a
distance through radiating his evil force abroad. (Some of the
most powerful shots in Mummy 1 are close-up's which show
his glowing eyes, lit like those of Lugosi in Dracula, as
he is engaged in willing some new disaster.) No ordinary weapons
are of avail against his power--even the amulet Muller gives to
Frank Whemple (David Manners) can do no more than ward off
Imhotep 1, not defeat him--and only the intervention of Isis can
vanquish him in the last reel.
In Mummy 2, however,
Imhotep 2's power is physical and pestiferous--whatever he
touches, he has the power to infect--the shades of Ebola and AIDS
walk in this mummy's cortege. Moreover, sheer physical force is
an effective weapon against this monster--not only does Rick
blast the priests with a machine gun, but after the spell from
the "good" Book of Amon Ra has been read, nullifying
Imhotep 2's invincibility, Rick can run through the now mortal
monster with a sword. Who would have dared try that with Imhotep
1? Qualitatively speaking, fear as represented in Mummy 1 and
Mummy 2 has undergone a profound transformation in the
intervening years: fear in Mummy 1 is that of
onto-theological annihilation, in Mummy 2 that of violent
physical destruction--of liquidation in more than one sense of
the word. Mummy 1 moves in a suffocatingly oppressive
world of obsessive, spiritualized rituals; Mummy 2 in a
labyrinth of paranoid violence--a labyrinth in which global
epidemics and international terrorism wait at every dark turning.
Continue
The Universal Mummy
Metamorphoses of the Mummy
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E-mail Dave:
daveclayton@worldnet.att.net