Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 113
The M u m m y
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help him stay alive throughout most of the film. We are never quite certain what to
make of Beni, although we know we would not trust him very far. In the end,
Beni’s luck runs out as his greed for a share of Hamunaptra’s treasure proves his
downfall and he is trapped inside the city and devoured by the scarab beetles.
These character and storyline choices suggest that Sommers is not certain
what kind of film he really wants to make, despite claims to the contrary. As a
result. The Mummy ]o\m another title of its era, Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man, as
fantasies notable for unraveling the very building blocks that make genre films a
treat. Rather than neatly interpolating the conventions of adjacent genre forms,
these films lose their way as their directors flit among genre conventions to arrive
at narratives that do not quite click for the industry-wise filmgoer. As Todd McCarthy
says in his review of The Mummy in Variety, “[t]his touring company Indiana
Jones tries to have it both ways, sending up the adventure genre for laughs while
also going for some mild shocks, but the sand slips through its fingers on both
counts” (1-2). Nonetheless, the film was the surprise hit of the 1999 spring season,
assuring the future production of additional Mummy titles and an animated series
for the television market..
Much has been written recently about the horror genre’s vitality with many
critics agreeing with Ira Konigsberg when he writes, '•'■[h]oiTor films seem to have
gone as far as they can legitimately go in horrifying people-the nadir has been
reached and the genre, for all intents and purposes, is on its last legs” (Horton &
McDougal, 251). If this is so, then it comes as no surprise that Stephen Sommers
chose to interweave his film with additional generic constructs to tell his story. But
one wonders what this film says about the contemporary film audience when a
director feels obligated to repeatedly splice his horror scenes with standard comedic
action-adventure fare. Have the old Universal horror icons simply run out of gas in
their ability to give us the shudders? As noted above, both Francis Ford Coppola
and Kenneth Branagh have given us contemporary re-tellings of Dracula and
Frankenstein that ask interesting epistemological questions amidst their horror,
thus suggesting that the basic theme of these two classics remains vital for the
modern-day audience.
Peter Bart has suggested in one of his weekly columns in Variety that our
popular culture is strengthened by its ambiguousness and unpredictability (87).
Stephen Sommers gives us none of either in The Mummy however, as he simply
gives the film’s taiget audience what it seeks by way of action scenes, flying bodies,
shock-cuts, and com puter graphics. In addition, the title ’s form ulaic
characterizations pale in comparison to the major players in the original by giving
us personaliti