As everyone has said (including me), DAWN OF THE MUMMY is less a stereotypical mummy movie than it is a stereotypical zombie movie. There's isn't one ghoul in rags strangling people and shuffling along like a gimp, but a posse of monsters (only one in bandages) who don't shuffle and don't strangle, but simply slouch and bite and stab. It's not a bad thing, in fact, I like it better than the average mummy flick. It's sad, I'm a hometown boy, errr, jackal, and I like the Egyptian culture, but it's rare to find a good Egyptian based flick. BLOOD FEAST was horrible, not one of Universal's old B&W mummy flicks ever really impressed me, and most everything else was crap. Recent decades have been kind to my homeland however, with the sci-fi releases STARGATE and the 1999 version of THE MUMMY, as well as it's sequel THE MUMMY RETURNS. Anyway, this is really just an Egyptian zombie flick, not a mummy movie...

Our little tale opens in the good ol' days of 3000 BC. Everyone's got their own personal 1969, and mine is 3000 BC, back when I had groupies and sacrifices and full paid insurance benefits. Those were the golden eons, back before Randy died in that terrible accident... Forget it, I don't wanna talk about it... Why'd ya have to go and die on me Randy?! We promised we'd go out together man! TOGETHER!... Oh yeah, anyway, 3000 BC, where a group of pillagers attack a small band of dessert people, grab some valuables, kill a few people, kidnap a kid or two and make their way back into the dessert... what this has to do with a guy named Syphilis Man is beyond my grasp, but oh well. Speaking of Syphilis Man, I don't know too much about HIM either! From what I can understand by what this priestess babe is saying, Syph was some kind of evil Pharaoh for whom the priestess is begging the Godz to spare, because he wasn't evil, simply misunderstood, like some other "Pharaohs". After her prayer, the villain, excuse me, the "misunderstood hero" is sealed in his tomb along with his bodyguards (who are still alive at this time and wearing funny felt headresses) before the crypt is filled with poisonous gas and laid on with a curse. Should anyone disturb the "good" king's final resting place, they will meet certain doom, and trust me, certain doom's not pretty, especially after it's been sitting in a dank old tomb for several millenia. So, in other words, fuck with the tomb and you'll be horribly killed and mutilated by the DAWN OF THE MUMMY.

Of course someone has to come along and disturb the tomb, or else we wouldn't have a movie. Enter a trio of bandits who have uncovered Syph's underground bungalow with the intent of burglary. Hey, he's been dead for nearly 5000 years, it's safe to say his gold and shit is up for grabs, right? So, they blow open the front door, then sit back and wait for all the deadly fumes to air out. Now THAT is dedication to your craft when you make a poison that's not stale even after 5000 years! Though, I imagine the deaths of the Pharaoh and his minions helped add to it. After all, like DOGMA taught us with the excremental Golgotha, after people die, eventually their bowels loosen, and it turns into shit creek... pardon we while I clean up all this vomit. The three are confronted by a crazy old lady who fortells unspeakable evils, blah blah blah. The real story here is the blacktooth on that woman's teeth! Could it be more obvious!? It's so sloppy it looks like she's been chewing on black licorice all afternoon... and she's yet to swallow it! Her terrible make-up aside, the men just laugh at her and send her on her way with a few gunshots. Rule #1 in a horror movie: never ignore the bad omens of seemingly crazy old people. They're usually not crazy, just confused and wreak of pepermint schnapps. Finally now, nearly 10 minutes into the film, the opening credits role over the beautiful afternoon life of New York City, where a rollergirl in a skin tight leotard gives me wood to a jazzy beat! Then it's back to Cairo... what the Hell just happened here?! We travel all the way across the fucking Atlantic to check out NYC for our opening credits, then we go right back to the Saharra?!?! Who's making this damn movie?! Did their filming permit for NYC only last them 15 minutes before they would've had to pay for more time?! HOW CHEAP ARE THESE ASSHOLES! I seriously wonder if I've made the right career path in life sometimes...

Okay, from the Big Crapple come a group of fancy-pants superficial ego-maniacal model types, headed to the sands of Egypt for a photo shoot... and a date with a certain felsh eating zombie mob I hope! No doubt, the evil evil people (I fear and hate models and photographers... 'lest they be in the business of free porn of course) Wind up doing their little pictorial not 50 yards away from the dead king's tomb and those bumbling graverobbers. In his paranoia and incompitence, one of the criminals mistakes the vain Americans for claim jumpers, and fearing all his hard work will go to waste, he opens fire on them. Now, if only he had better aim, I'd be a very happy movie critic right now, and all the beautiful people would be mercifully dead... mercy for me of course, not them, as I would hope they all could die slow painful ends, bleeding to death and picked apart by vultures in the sun bleached sands of time. But, of course, the guy's blind as a kung-fu master and misses them all. His boss hears the shots and stops him before he can reload (I now hate the head bad guy too) and tries to make amends with the wayward fashion folks. Like the snobs they are, the walking mannequins (that brings back some good memories) stroll onto the site, wave some bullshit about how they have permission to shoot anywhere in Cairo they damn well please, and decide that the tomb will be perfect. Yes, there's nothing fashion magazines need more than mummified bodies... as if there weren't enough skeletons in them already

Flaunting their freedom of location like forgein dignitaries on a bender, the group uses if to mess up some priceless artifacts and ruin Syphilis Man's corpse, bathing it in heat lamps and causing it to ooze and bubble battery acid and piping hot trails of oil, much like the inside of a McDonalds apple pie! All in the name of selling overpriced pieces of ugly clothing to stupid rich people, i.e. "fashion". Boy, models, they don't care WHAT ancient culture they hurt! As foretold, the disturbance finally arouses, I mean, arises Syphilis Man and his goons, and the undead gang fo mid-eastern on everyone's asses! But, like I said, they have a lot more in common with the cast of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD than they ever will with Borris Karloff, or Arnold Vosloo for that matter. After picking off the supporting cast one-by-one for a while, the ghouls head to the local marketplace, where they turn a nice little wedding into a funeral march/walking shmorgasbourge, a shmorgasbourge where death is the only thing on the menu!... and peasants. Yep, not only do the demons kill like zombies, but they also take it upon themselves to enjoy their spoils too, chomping on the still warm flesh of their victims and playing with their squishy miles of organ meat, also severing limbs, hacking people up with meat cleavers, and poking the occasional eyeball out! Told ya this was a living dead movie. The rampage is ended eventually though, when the lead model (yes, I think they actually have a lead model) and her last few friends grab some TNT borrowed from the tomb raiders, lure the lead mummy into a shack, and blow him up. With their bout of Syphilis over with, they three throw their arms around each other, laugh, and head off to smoke up on some hookah, despite the carnage and destruction around them, including their half eaten friends. But, don't give that sigh of relief just yet folks, because in '80s slasher fashion, Syph throws his hand upwards from the debris just in time for the end credits to roll. Actually, I imagine you can let out that sigh of relief now after all, cuz I don't see a sequel for this happening anywhere in the near future... Hell, near future nothing, I don't think we'll be seeing a sequel to THIS even before I die... and I'm fucking eternal!

Actually, not making a sequel to this would be a good thing. Though I like it better than most other "mummy" movies, this zombie movie was just too dark. It's so dark at times that you can't tell what the fuck is going on! You might hear a scream and be like, "alright, another dead model!", but then, in the next, better lit scene you discover that no one died, it was just a sex scene, which, by the way, there are few of and not nearly is there enough skin to keep you occupied. I do love how this plays out like any old '80s slasher flick though. You know, slim and "attractive" people always go off into the night alone, just to wind up on the end of some hungry corpse's skewer or in their leathery undead claws. The most apparent evidence that this is just another Jason flick, is the Oasis scene. Since there's no lake or middle-of-nowhere pond to be found, two of the chicks decide to go for a late night swim... at an oasis. And no, there aren't any British Beatles poseurs in there either. For the few moments when the lighting was a little more than "pitch", the gore FX were usually quite sad. The severed heads especially and the disembowelments too. You can tell Tom Savini was NOWHERE nearby when this film was shit, uhm, shot. On one last note, I have to question the ghouls' eating habits. Why should they bother with the models? There's no meat on their bones what-so-ever, just some flesh contaminated with "beautifying" toxins and a couple bags of sand... or gel depending on how up with the times these broads were before they croaked.

Sequels: Nope

If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: DAY OF THE DEAD or ZOMBIE