The Mummy (2026)

Score: 3 / 5

Lee Cronin's big-budget bloodbath has more in common with the Evil Dead franchise than anything related to Universal's property, but that doesn't make it any less entertaining and disgusting.

In developing his original take on curses involving mummified bodies, Cronin crafts a strange story that removes any sentimental ideas about a pharaoh-mummy looking for his ancient lost love (like in the 1932 original or any of its sequels and remakes) or even one seeking global domination. Instead Cronin gives us a family grieving its daughter, abducted in Cairo with no trace. Moving on in Albuquerque, they're shocked to receive a call eight years later that Katie, their eldest, has been inexplicably found, having been tortured and malnourished to the point of catatonia, despite being in otherwise reasonable health. She's brought home and brings an unspeakable horror with her, threatening to tear the family apart, and I do mean bodily.

Our filmmaker pulls from what he learned in his previous directorial feature, Evil Dead Rise, in how to be as gross and wet as possible on screen. Actually, once Katie is home and the real horrors commence, the story could just as well be about the chaotic Deadites; people are violated, mutilated, and possessed in rapid, often random sequence. Cronin does seem to have some trouble pacing the film in a consistent manner, and I think that has to do with these competing impulses of what defines a mummy movie and what makes torture porn. He has to often pause the onslaught of violence to explain a fairly complex plot involving a demon that consumes family units; any previous Mummy movie is almost exclusively about its plot, whereas no Evil Dead movie is about its plot (at least, none of the ones worth watching). But when we get back to the violence, it can be pretty hard to stomach.

Part of the problem with these gross-out horror films with big budgets -- I'm also thinking of Evil Dead Burn, this summer -- is that there's only so much they can do that hasn't been done before. While there's always room for simple stylistic differences, some of these franchises push things perhaps too far. I had trouble, during the climax of this film, stomaching some of the abject cruelty it was projecting from the screen. I can handle a lot, but watching extended sequences of a child being terrorized and tortured was simply unpleasant, made much worse intercut with her parents' helpless reaction to seeing it all graphically recorded on VHS. After an entire -- and too lengthy, really -- film that made us wonder about how Katie had been tormented into the monster we see, they finally decide to show us in gratuitous manner without justifying the need for us to see it. Hearing it is almost unbearable enough.

Cronin's skills at crafting nasty scares don't entirely make up for this screenplay, which also features a few too many holes for my liking. Much like the Deadites, there don't seem to be any rules as to what the demon inside Katie can do, so she can conveniently perform telekinesis or telepathy at certain moments. The characters simply do not behave rationally around this consistently violent and profane presence in their house, like the grandmother who repeatedly prays over Katie and gets attacked each time. And don't get me started on the plane crash scene that inexplicably reveals Katie to the authorities.

But then, who comes to a movie like this (meaning like torture porn, not a cute '90s adventure-comedy-romance about ancient curses and librarians) for the plot? It's all about the big set pieces covered in gore, and Cronin does that effectively. A notable scene that felt ripped from Sam Raimi himself features lots of bodily fluids being splashed all over plates of food and wine at a funeral service, and it's a moment like that when you can see why an auteur decides to pursue certain material. He's helped in pursuing his vision by a dedicated cast, including wide-eyed Jack Reynor and a fierce Laia Costa, whose scenes together (usually terrified, always weeping) must have been simply exhausting to shoot.

Midsommar (2019)

Score: 5 / 5

Sophomore slumps are not a thing in 2019. Jordan Peele's Us and now Ari Aster's Midsommar are two of the best horror films in the last decade. Not always scary, but intensely uncomfortable and deeply disturbing, these two pictures complicate and renew existential horror as a sub-genre. They are also fascinating steps forward for our two newest horror auteurs. If Jordan Peele's first outing was a streamlined, economical dissection of modern race relations, his second was a scream of bloody fury against our racist country. If Ari Aster's first outing was a calculated, precise portrait of family disintegration and trauma, his second is a chorus of screams for newfound family (and still lots of trauma). Both second films pile on so many layers of significance they become consummate works of art, constantly offering new readings.

We begin Midsommar in the dead of winter. We don't know it yet, but the opening images are of a murder-suicide. We get the news later as we center our focus on Dani (Florence Pugh), whose sister committed the crimes. Suddenly an orphan, Dani despairs, hoping the arms of her boyfriend will comfort her. The aptly named Christian (Jack Reynor) does precious little to comfort her, as he doesn't much want to be in this relationship. In fact, for most of the first hour of this 140-minute movie, the film primarily works as a black comedy, showing the emotional violence we enact on the people we love and the people we don't. It's a skin-prickling hour of awkward silences, passive-aggressive conversation, and lots of male-driven micro-aggressions.

This might feel like an unnecessarily long intro, but really this is the meat of the matter. It's the horror of our daily lives, and how our relationships with people we love disintegrate. Existential horror, here rooted in the ties that bind us, often begins with sudden loss and continues with efforts by the protagonist to find a place in a community we don't fully understand. Dani and Christian are clearly not a good match, and both are to blame; because we are often restricted to Dani's perspective and given more of her story, she becomes our default protagonist and who we tend to sympathize with. After all, it's Christian who wants out of the relationship but stays, who schemes and manipulates her behind her back, who is unfaithful in mind if not anywhere else. Yet.

But his friends are heading to Sweden for a month-long getaway, visiting a peer's home: a commune nestled in the idyllic plains of Halsingland. One of them (William Jackson Harper) is working on his thesis; Christian hijacks that too, eventually. One of them (Will Poulter) is a lustful clown looking for as much Scandinavian action as he can get (note: he doesn't actually get any that we see). While there, they will be the guests of the Harga, a community of nature-worshippers living out of time and place. Dressed in white robes -- "hermaphroditic" one calls their androgynous garb -- they decorate themselves with ancient runes and wildflowers, dance in the fields, and consume hallucinogenic roots and fruits around their valley.

It sounds a lot like paradise, and for most of the film, it is. This part of the story gets far more difficult to discuss unless you are familiar with The Wicker Man, from which Aster clearly takes his inspiration. In that 1973 classic, a detective investigates a missing woman in a cult, only to find himself the unwitting sacrifice for a pagan ritual. In Midsommar, we know exactly what will happen the whole time -- very nearly the same thing, but importantly different, as we will see -- and the horror comes from a plodding pace from which we cannot escape. It's an organized nightmare; no, daymare, really, as everything is doused in brilliant white light the entire time. Think Insomnia but less Al Pacino and more grass. Here, the students visit hoping to learn more, but find themselves part of the ritual; Dani, however, becomes the May Queen, and thus finds a new family as she takes a perverse revenge against her boyfriend.

It's all rather difficult to discuss, and I know I'm not doing it any justice. It's an experience you have to, well, experience to understand. And even through experiencing it, you don't understand. Nothing is explained, and very little makes concrete sense. You go through the film feeling everything, from the incredible score (half of which is diegetic) to the whirling, acrobatic camera. The extreme closeups on Florence Pugh's face force you to feel her virtuoso performance, and the bright sunlight bleaches everything so much that you're not always sure if what you see is a special effect or not.

With pacing akin to that of an opera, Midsommar stands apart from its ilk in its acute attention to internal emotion, its alarming color scheme and lightscape, and its amazing array of thematic concerns. This is a cornerstone of the genre, a magnificent achievement that is, sure, less entertaining than Hereditary, but infinitely more detailed and disturbing.

Free Fire (2017)

Score: 4 / 5

Ben Wheatley's newest flick is what would happen if you cross the climax of a Western with Tarantino and place it in 1970. But it's actually entertaining.

I've always preferred his horror pictures, and I love High-Rise despite its being a bit of a mess, but Free Fire does some really interesting things. It's essentially an hour and a half of chaos and comedy with delightful if forgettable performances, excellent choreography, a wisecracking screenplay, and lots of gun violence. I don't much care for shootouts in movies, let alone movies about shootouts, but there was enough fluff here to keep me invested. And, of course, it has a double-digit body count.

The primary fluff? Costumes. This movie is period all the way, and the '70s flair is killer. The movie is an homage to '70s B-movie style, especially with the polyester and shoulder pads, even with its lighting, which douses the set in a golden, hazy hue. "The set" is correct because there is only one: an old warehouse in Boston that serves, at least on this occasion, as the business location of an arms dealer. Sharlto Copley plays Vernon, a raging psychopath, selling his wares this time to some Irish Republican guerrillas, led by Cillian Murphy. Their associates and henchmen -- including the ferocious Brie Larson and adorable Armie Hammer -- are about evenly divided, totaling 13 characters. 12 are angry men, whose anger issues and innate violence are ignited by the revelation that one (Jack Reynor) had beaten up another (Sam Riley) recently for abusing his female cousin.

It doesn't take long -- the exposition is the first third of the movie, and frankly by the end of the film I still wasn't sure of the character names or motivations -- before bullets fly. The avenger shoots the abuser, and immediately both sides grapple for the guns (which seems unnecessary since almost all of them already had other guns on their persons) and it's, well, free fire. By the halfway mark of the movie, everyone's been shot. Half of them can't even walk. But their mouths are working just fine, and their wisecracks and insults hit the mark far more often than their bullets do. It seems very American that the characters stay hidden most of the movie, popping up sporadically to fire a stream of shots at nothing in particular or at least in the general direction of another person, and only manage to injure each other occasionally.

It's an absurdist chamber piece, but instead of wondering when Godot will show up, these guys (and gal) are trying to kill each other for no discernible reason. Several times characters pointedly mention not knowing who shot whom, or who is dead or alive. More importantly, they don't seem to care. Even after one particularly gruesome death, the characters seem to remain in good humor. The violence was inevitable, the results of that violence are expected and witnessed, but there are no lessons to be learned. It's a damning indictment of gun culture even as it defends that culture against those who would misuse it: Namely, raving lunatics and insecure men seeking to overcompensate.

There's no shortage of intelligence in this movie, though I would have preferred a bit more clarity on characters and their motivations. Sure, the film is shot and edited with precision, and how the makers managed to find so many interesting perspectives in a single, small warehouse is beyond me. But ultimately I didn't much care for anyone, so I didn't feel anything as they died. It's the opposite of a horror film, where you so often expect everyone will die but get attached to them anyway; here, I wanted to love Larson and Murphy and Hammer and Copley, but I wasn't given the chance to know them. The film even comments on this, near the climax: The only phone in the warehouse is ringing (I know, a shootout movie without cell phones is not something we see much of these days). The only phone is in the upstairs office, so of course going there is akin to suicide. One character finally picks up the phone and is immediately shot and killed by Copley. We hear the recorded message, offering a free lifetime supply of premier ground meat. The irony is that half the people in the warehouse are already ground meat, and the other half are well on their way.

IMDb: Free Fire