RUSSELL MULCAHY'S TALE OF THE MUMMY
"An archeologist unearths an ancient mummy - the evil prince Talos - from a cursed Egyptian tomb. Years later, Talos rises from the dead."
On paper, Russell Mulcahy's Tale Of The Mummy looks pretty good. It's got a great cast, including Sean Pertwee, Jack Davenport, Lysette Anthony, Michael Lerner, Jason Scott Lee, Shelley Duvall, Honor Blackman and Jon Polito, not to mention the legendary Christopher Lee.
It was directed and co-written by Russell Mulcahy (as if the title didn't give that away), the man responsible for Highlander... as well Highlander 2 and essentially an entire filmography of garbage aside from Highlander... okay, maybe Mulcahy's name isn't exactly the mark of quality, and maybe he's been coasting on the goodwill of Highlander for nearly thirty years, but that doesn't mean Tale Of The Mummy has to be as bad as nearly everything else the man has directed, right?
The film tells the story of Talos, the most evil motherfucker in ancient Egypt. He did a bunch of bad things and forced his acolytes to eat his organs, which somehow granted him the power to cheat death. Thousands of years later, Christopher Lee and friends unearth his tomb, turn to porcelain, and shatter in an example of some of the absolute worst digital effects I have ever seen. Just painfully bad effects all around in this movie, but I digress.
Fifty years after Dracula shattered like an old clay pot, a new group of explorers find the tomb of Talos, including Gerard Butler, but he dies ten seconds after he's introduced, so nobody cares. The group brings Talos back to England for an exhibition, but his sentient bandages sneak away like a thief in the night, murdering the descendants of the people who ate his organs all those centuries ago, reconstituting his flesh in preparation for an upcoming planetary alignment that will make him...
I don't know. Unstoppable, maybe? The movie isn't exactly clear on the specifics, suffice to say it's bad news if Talos sticks around for the celestial event, so our hero, Mowgli from that mediocre live-action The Jungle Book movie from back in the day, tries to stop him.
But Mowgli fails in his task, because he's apparently the reincarnation of Talos' bride, who ate his heart a long time ago and has just been waiting for the opportunity to give it back. So this ridiculous-looking purple monster with goat legs emerges from a cocoon of mummy bandages and eats Mowgli's heart, then crawls around in the dirt for a few minutes, transforming into evil Mowgli, who just wears a sharp suit and growls at the camera as the planets align and the movie ends.
Russell Mulcahy's Tale Of The Mummy is fucking worthless. The cast is great, but most of the actors show up for glorified cameos, and the rest of the poor bastards have to stick around to recite gobs of insipid dialogue in a plot that's trying desperately to be clever, but is so awkwardly executed that it just comes across as lazy.
For nearly ninety minutes, a series of images proceed to just occur in some sort of order, but they never really come together to create anything remotely satisfying. The movie is just a thing people made that holds absolutely no significance. It has no heart, no soul. It's as benign and unremarkable as an unpainted wall. And who wants to stare at an unpainted wall for an hour and a half?
YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT!
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