Dawn of the Mummy

Don't let the fact that this looks absolutely nothing like the actor it's supposed to be make you question the realism of the scene.

That night, the modeling crew's token Egyptian buddy, Ahmed, shows up at the camp to check in on them. They don't tell him about the shootings, the bodies, the attacks, or any of the other horrible things that have happened. Hell, they don't even mention where they're shooting. Instead, they get right down to the important stuff. Gary sits him down and asks him where he can score some more weed. Ahmed agrees to take him and Jenny into the nearest town, where they can go to a hookah bar. Gary smokes so damn much that the guy who owns the hookah bar invites him to his wedding the next day. I'm not one to judge, but if your dealer invites you to his wedding after knowing you for fifteen minutes, it's conceivable that you might smoke too much. Rick's other partner, the one who's still alive, goes to work in some sort of meat storage facility. The specific nature of his job isn't important, and most likely arose out of convenience than anything actually written in the script. The mummy appears in the doorway with a large knife in his hand. Yep, unfathomable undead powers and he kills people like Crocodile Dundee. There's a great shot between the guy seeing the mummy, the mummy swinging the knife down, and the guy staggering around with a knife in his skull where the actor is replaced by a dummy - a dummy that has seen better days. The shot is completely unnecessary and there's no way in hell that the dummy could ever pass for the actor, but good ol' Frank Agrama, he left it in the movie anyway. What dedication that guy has! My gosh!

Melinda and Joan go skinnydipping in a pond near the camp, remarkably not showing any flesh in the process. It's amazing. Usually, in incredibly shitty movies, they give you some skin to work with so the viewing experience isn't a complete waste. In "Dawn of the Mummy," there must be a stipulation in every actor's contract that they can show nothing below the chin at any point. Joan walks back to the camp, narrowly avoiding a zombie hand sticking out of the ground. When Melinda heads back, she's not quite so lucky. She has a run-in the with mummy. Of course, the mummy doesn't kill her. Rather, as she's running from him, she gets caught by that same hand sticking out of the ground and a couple zombies attack her. She even gets away from them before she falls into a hole and dies. Because it's an evil hole, presumably.

"Hey, that's where I parked my car!"

The next day, Rick goes into town to pick up his buddy, but finds him dead. Having saved the models from so many dead and dying people before, Rick knows just what to do in this situation. He screams like a woman, vomits, and runs away. He returns to the tomb, where he basically goes insane. All of his crazy shouting and whooping throughout the movie makes sense when there are other people around, but when he's on his own, it's just a little weird ("HAHAHA! SEPHRIMAN! HAHA! YES! GOLD! TRA LA LA! I'M SO LONELY!"). He finally finds Sephriman's treasure room and practically has a seizure when he sees all the gold. His reverie is broken, however, when he hears a heavy breathing and looks up to see the mummy closing in on him. As Rick is strangled to death, the audience has the time to ask the sixty-four thousand dollar question: why the fuck is the mummy breathing heavily? I thought that was pretty much the point of being the walking dead - you don't need to breathe, you don't need to hydrate, hell, you don't even have to blink unless you feel like it. But here's this mummy panting like he just ran a marathon. The sheer blowfulness of this movie never ceases to astound and amaze me.

Gary and Hookah Guy have a contest to see who can spit on the other's culture the fastest.

The models wrap up their shooting, but they can't find Melinda anywhere. So, always in that team mentality, they just stop looking. Looking is hard. Gary and Bill go into town for the hookah guy's wedding. Gary gives the hookah guy his cowboy hat as a wedding present, and then some fat woman dances in the street. It's a different culture, that's for sure. Bill leaves Gary behind and drives up to the tomb to look for any sign of Melinda. While he's up there, he finds the treasure room. With some better lighting, we can now actually witness an interesting phenomenon. Apparently the ancient Egyptians decorated the most precious rooms in their tombs with wallpaper. How about that? Knowledge is power! A really godawful model of Rick's severed head falls into Bill's arms, but it's close enough to freak him out and send him packing. He drives back to the camp, but the zombies are waiting for him on the way. They manage to trap his Land Rover and grab onto him, but he escapes and outruns them. Damn ineffectual stink zombies. The zombies reach the camp before Bill does, despite the fact that he's moving faster than they are. You gotta love that zombie logic. One of them grabs Bill by the throat, which melts his neck for some reason. Sure, the actual mummy has to use a freaking meat cleaver to get the job done, but his zombie minions touch you and you burn to death. That's fair. Man, this mummy got the short end of the bandage. Lisa and Joan (who appeared at the last second to take the only other remaining horse) make it away, but Jenny gets eaten by zombies. Sorry, Jenny, only real models get to live.

At the wedding party, hookah guy gets ready to join his wife in the ceremonial hibbity dibbity chamber, but when he pulls back the curtain, he finds that she has been violated! Zombie violated! That is to say, she's dead and they're eating her. Zombies attack the whole wedding, which is impressive considering there are all of six zombies total in the entire army, and we're talking about an entire town full of people. Lisa and Joan make it to the town on horseback, but the mummy is there, too, so maybe it's not the place to be. The two girls find Rick's dynamite stockpile and rig a bomb to take the mummy down. He is consumed in the explosion, and Lisa and Joan are able to walk away. And hey, Gary, who was... someplace... pops out of nowhere, and he's okay too! Hooray! As the three of them walk off to God knows where, since they're in a ravaged village in the middle of the Egyptian desert, the mummy lifts his hand, letting all who walk the earth know and tremble at the knowledge that he has a hand.

"Dawn of the Mummy" is an insanely bad movie made all the worse by the fact that it's not some no-budget attempt at filmmaking like a Polonia brothers movie. This piece of crap had a budget and a full crew behind it. Frank Agrama co-wrote the script, but I have to hope that when he was writing it, he wasn't envisioning it like he ended up directing it. I want someone to tell me that he went blind and deaf before principle photography began. The directorial, and moreover, editing choices made in this movie feel like they were cobbled together by a spastic eight year old sitting on a bug zapper. As far as sound quality is concerned, I'm giving this movie points in its favor for the cheesy disco tracks used during some of the photoshoots. The sound quality for the dialogue is terrible, though, the dubbing is painfully bad, and the rest of the soundtrack is filled with unbearable squawks and screeches that make my temples throb just thinking about them. I will say this about "Dawn of the Mummy" - while it may suck normally, when played through at triple speed, it's goddamn hilarious!

Each category in the rating system is based out of a possible -10 score (-10 being the worst). The overall score is based out of a possible -50 score (-50 being the worst).

– Ben "Greasnin" Platt