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today:
5.4.99 anyhow, before the movie, the audience was tortured with yet another preview/commercial/desperate plea for Universal's THE MUMMY. i promise that there is not one person alive that has seen any of the mummy commercials and said, "ooh -- scary." legitimately possible alternative reactions might be "is that billy zane as the mummy?" or "is this the sequel to stargate?" or "does god hate its creation so much that it would release this plague on humankind?" when i see commercials for movies like THE MUMMY i can't help but think i would honestly (trust me, please. this is true) rather watch a two hour movie of a really obese man dancing around in a room full of 40 million dollars, bills swirling around through the aid of an industrual exhaust fan in the room's floor (a la the delightful 1980 film, HOW TO BEAT THE HIGH COST OF LIVING). maybe an hour into the movie, the guy could eat a money sandwich or just starting flushing piles of money down a toilet or something. that would be enjoyable for me because i know it would still be 50 million dollars cheaper than putting a movie like THE MUMMY on the big screen. a relative bargain. here's the reality: no one has ever been scared by a mummy movie. ever. when i was small, if i wasn't called to work the fields, my saturday afternoons were spent watching black and white monster movies on cable television. they were so cool to me. scary monsters from the 1930s, 40s and 50s were like professional wrestlers to me. i wanted to see frankenstein fight the wolfman, or dracula fight the beast from 20,000 fathoms. but i didn't give a rat's butt what happened to the mummy. the mummy never even made my monster wrestling card. even as a small, anemic child i was fairly confident that, if it came down to blows, i could give the mummy an embarrassing thrashing. it was a slow-moving pile of brittle bandages. if i was too weak to fight the mummy, i could at least outrun it. the mummy was so crappy that i don't even remember the secret to killing it. it wasn't something dramatic like a silver bullet or sunlight. i think you just had to sneak up behind a mummy and scare it or get a stray kitten to unravel its bandages. this allows me to make certain predictions about the new MUMMY. in fact, i can see people trying to sell it at a million production conferences. so here's my impression of everyone affiliated with universal's new THE MUMMY, when being interviewed by the press: "I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised. You see, our mummy is very fast. It's been totally updated for the 90s. This mummy can run." "What makes this mummy film different from the 1932 film? Well, this mummy is totally digital. Every scene of the mummy was created on a computer. And it's very, very fast. I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised." "Well, I got a real workout on this film, running from that mummy. It's very fast! Not like the old mummy. Faster = Scarier. This mummy is fast." "What? Yes, this mummy is still composed entirely of bandages. But these bandages actually help to propel him faster, unlike the leaden, decaying bandages of the 1932 mummy film. Plus, our mummy has a jetpack. Yes, this mummy has quite a few tricks up its sleeve. Not the least of which is a completely digitally rendered mummy rocket car. It took over 4 million frames to animate the mummy speeding across the desert in its rocket car." "Brendan was great, because he helped me get over my fear of this new, fast mummy. He was a real gentleman on the set. And he's quite a hunk? Did you see George of the Jungle? No. Well, me either, but I hear he's very hunky in it."
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