Day of the Mummy

Watch the trailer, the movie is worse than the trailer, which is frankly appalling. I'd prefer root canal therapy without anesthetic to sitting through this rubbish. Shabby POV footage, tired storyline. The screenplay appears to have been written by a particularly slow witted 10 year old boy with a mummy fetish. I'd recommend watching damned near anything else besides this film. There is a plethora of better films about mummies that you could watch, pick any of them and you'll be well served avoiding this rancid POS. If you're the product of incest then this may be the film for you. Otherwise I advise avoiding this at all costs.

I don't think I've ever seen a more bored group of actors pretending to be actors. The characters are completely devoid of any sort of personality, charming or otherwise. They have no notable growth as people to make it interesting. Oh sure, the hero is a sleazy, greedy jerk who also believes that people's lives are worth more than money, but that doesn't make him heroic now does it? No, it makes him pretty normal I'd say. I've known more than a few people who behave like degenerates when left to their own devices, but will still go through heck to be there for a friend in need. People are funny like that, but I can't call them heroic.

And what's with the strong lady who is hired for "security"? Looks to me like she was hired because she's hot. Not to be rude, but she seriously didn't do anything useful in this movie except drop the tough guy act and crawl into the hero's sleeping bag before the first half hour was through.

The storyline is like being fed spoonfuls of dusty Egyptian fairy tales that are obviously garbage. It sounded fake even to me, a guy who knows next to nothing about Egyptian history.

Fortunately, special effects were limited in this feature. I'm not a big fan of overdone special effects, but having the camera blink out when anything exciting happens has never been a convincing method of building the tension to me. Especially when there isn't a reason for the camera to be blinking out.

But of course the biggest weakness this movie has is the "found footage" style of filming. I don't care how clever the writers think they are. "We thought up YET ANOTHER way to explain having a convenient camera to film everything in our movie! Yay!" It feels more like a ripoff of popular video games like "Metal Gear", with the boss routinely appearing in the corner every few seconds to bark an order, and the hero's voice coming in smoothly crystal clear, like it was recorded in a studio (it was, by the way).

Are there any good bits? I feel like I should mention some, but to be honest I'm having trouble thinking of any. The performance was very dry and honestly fairly dispassionate. Sure the actors ACTED angry, sad, in pain and the like, but it just still felt.. distant. Like you didn't have to care. Somewhere along the way the movie just got so cheesy that the viewer feels removed rather than involved. It fails to pull you in.

It's not the worst movie I've ever seen, but it really just feels completely unexceptional and easily forgotten. In my mind, this is the greatest failure any movie can have, to be unmemorable. So I'm giving it a 2 to be generous.

You can see the miscasting in the opening scene, one half of a scene to setup a entire movie of cheap handy cam, point of view movie making, it was atrocious. The Mummy shows up very late in the movie, and we are never released from handy cam hell(if your on that tight of a budget, skip making a movie) or at least learn to make a movie that does not look like you made it for a boob tube channel.I kept hoping for the camera battery to go dead, unfortunately for me it held a charge to finish the 1 hour and 20 minutes of this wreck. For what he did in the movie, Glover was OK, it is just a shame to see him take work like this. Dreadful,Cheap,Cheesy. Save your money for a DVD of something watchable.

Out of the over 260 Found Footage films I have seen, only a handful combine exotic locales with a setting rich in history (see list at the end). There definitely needs to be more, for when a found footage movie manages to take advantage of the setting, the result can be an amazing vicarious experience. Unfortunately, it does not happen too often, and here the result is mixed.

DAY OF THE MUMMY is a found footage horror adventure movie in which a team of archaeologists are looking for the tomb of a cursed pharaoh, and the protagonist in addition is secretly given the task by the wealthy financier of the expedition, played by Danny Glover, to find a valuable gemstone.

The movie feels very much like a live-action video game, with the gimmick of a camera being clandestinely installed in the protagonist's eyeglasses and the financier boss periodically adding commentary to the happenings on screen through a hidden ear piece. I take it that the protagonist, an Indiana Jones type, is meant to be drawn as a complex character, not entirely good and not entirely bad, but he ends up feeling like a video game character, too.

Although the film has some atmosphere, the happenings on screen are always at arm's length and therefore fail to involve the audience. There are also some major requirements of suspension of disbelief (e.g. A signal going through even while deep inside a cave: the group reaching a chamber full of lit candles and never even asking who lit them and when, and so on). The ending was less than satisfying.

Still, there was enough to at least keep me entertained. So, while it is not a good found footage movie, I think the IMDB rating (2.6 as of this writing) is too harsh. The film may well have an audience in those who, like me, enjoy found footage movies with an adventure component and exotic setting.

There is one other ancient Egypt-themed FF movie I know of, made even the same year as this, THE PYRAMID (2014), which is a couple of notches better (see my review). Some other comparable movies I liked are

1. JERUZALEM (2015)

2. AS ABOVE, SO BELOW (2014)

3. FINAL PRAYER (2013)

Only one Mummy movie, in my opinion, is worse and that's The Mummy Resurrected, which had eerily similar problems to the ones that this had. Day of the Mummy does have one redeeming quality(whereas The Mummy Resurrected had none) and that's the location of the inside of the Mummy's tomb, suitably claustrophobic and effectively creepy. In fact the locations in general are not too bad. But it was very difficult to enjoy them because the movie had such a dreary look and the way Day of the Mummy was shot was highly suggestive someone having the complete inability to keep a camera/video-recorder straight.

Day of the Mummy does use the found footage-like/picture-in-picture idea. This could have worked and could have potentially been creative, but it is way over-used and often at points where it was not needed. To say it was distracting was an understatement, so much so that a lot of the time it was used it took me right out of the movie. The script is incredibly weak, some of it sounds like it was improvised on the spot but most of it sounds like the actors only received the dialogue just minutes before and were reading from cue cards, hence why it was acted out in such an uninvolved and awkward manner. As for the story, there are glimpses of one but there is strong emphasis on the glimpses, what there is of story is painfully predictable, interminably slow in pace and lacking in everything you'd expect for a horror to work(suspense, tension, horror, fun, scares, thrills etc.).

The characters are walking clichés ridden to death, and they are not developed or interesting at all so it's impossible to root for them. To make things worse the acting is awful from actors who clearly did not want to be there in the first place, even from Danny Glover who squints and winces his way through his screen time giving the impression of why did I ever agree to do this. However that he is actually the best actor in the movie is testament to how bad the acting is, William McNamara is a long way from a dashing hero and actually looks bored out of his skull, even the most bored-sounding answering machine has more energy than him. Don't expect the Mummy/monster to save the movie, it doesn't look too bad but it's under-utilised, it acts intoxicated rather than imposing so it doesn't come across as scary at all and it's hard to shake off the feeling of that it's a man in a costume. Apparently the director has prior experience, but considering the ineptness of the direction here that's hard to believe.

In conclusion, awful movie in every way apart from the tomb location. Maybe see it to see for yourself how Glover fares here and how his career has gone down the toilet, otherwise while not quite as abysmal as The Mummy Resurrected Day of the Mummy should have stayed buried. 1/10 Bethany Cox