{"id":541,"date":"2026-04-17T17:35:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T17:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yasbou.com\/?p=541"},"modified":"2026-04-17T17:35:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T17:35:00","slug":"review-lee-cronins-hamunaptra-is-more-a-passion-project-than-embalming-by-committee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yasbou.com\/?p=541","title":{"rendered":"Review: &#8220;Lee Cronin&#8217;s &#8216;Hamunaptra&#8217; is more a passion project than embalming by committee.&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div data-element=\"story-body\" data-subscriber-content=\"\">\n<p>How is Lee Cronin doing? Are you okay. You know, we&#8217;re still making movies. This is his third novel. Someone &#8211; maybe it was Lee Cronin himself, but probably not &#8211; wanted us to know that his latest project, Lee Cronin&#8217;s The Mummy, is more than just a mummy movie. Certainly not what you might imagine. A dead man in bandages, some creepy hieroglyphs, maybe Brendan Fraser. This isn&#8217;t that mummy movie. This is &#8220;Lee Cronin&#8217;s The Mummy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>We remain vague about what that proprietary credit means. Cronin&#8217;s previous film was Evil Dead Lies, a sequel that focused on the mushy game plan that Fede Alvarez envisioned in his 2013 reimagining of Sam Raimi&#8217;s gory comedy. At a time when horror seems to be unearthing a particularly rich vein (we even saw an Oscar win for The Unforgettable Witch in Weapons ), Lee Cronin represents the safe, old-fashioned dutiful stewardship of getting through the work of a typical night out.<\/p>\n<p>There are worse sins in the world. And the best way to introduce an ancient Egyptian curse is through a prologue that looks very similar to the one in &#8220;The Exorcist.&#8221; Who is the woman with the creepy smile beckoning a young girl at the edge of the garden? Doesn&#8217;t matter. The child went missing, and eight years later, her American family still feels the loss since moving to suburban New Mexico. Charlie (Jack Reynor), a TV reporter, his haunted wife Larissa (Laia Costa), and their two semi-surly children, Maud (Billy Roy) and Sebastian (Shilo Molina).<\/p>\n<p>But when their precious Katie (the game&#8217;s Natalie Grace) somehow returns to them, with wrinkled, dry skin and jagged toenails in a near-catatonic state that would make a peditext shriek, it&#8217;s hard to blame them for feeling euphoric. Working from his own screenplay, Cronin navigates the plot&#8217;s gaping holes and, while the Doctor may have something on his mind here, gets to the good stuff with a family at home and a live-in demon resting in a bedroom in cringe-worthy close quarters.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Lee Cronin&#8217;s &#8216;Hamunaptra&#8217; works best as a variation on Ari Aster&#8217;s breakout film, &#8216;Hereditary,&#8217; a smoother, less sinful piece of work, with Grace&#8217;s Katie, prone to jaw-clacking clicks and distant glances, and Milly Shapiro&#8217;s hypnotic tartness as the doomed emcee.&#8221; By the end, the situation becomes more obvious, with the wheelchair floating in the air and the wheelchair flying over the ceiling, which I actually like more, but it&#8217;s because of the juicy gore, Katie&#8217;s skin peeling off in the sheets. She goes to town with her teeth.<\/p>\n<p>All of these moments are suitable for audience groans, and there&#8217;s some fun bad cinema here to latch onto \u2014 and that&#8217;s when Cronin isn&#8217;t moving the action back to Egypt, pulling the strings of a low-powered mystery involving a one-dimensional Cairo detective (May Karamawy) seeking the root of the problem. Why bring in a fat archeology professor (Mark Mitchinson) if you&#8217;re going to give him just one scene? He&#8217;s the kind of character who usually makes it to the big denouement.<\/p>\n<p>The film is mired in a confusing mess of references. It&#8217;s a possession thriller, and along with the expected mouth-to-mouth vomiting, it&#8217;s also about to show us some grainy video footage akin to &#8220;The Ring&#8221; or &#8220;Bring Her Back.&#8221; Ironically, an exotic, honest-to-goodness mummy movie (the first one was released in 1932 in the wake of the worldwide frenzy over King Tut&#8217;s tomb) makes a lot of sense now that America has wandered into an exotic desert.<\/p>\n<p>Did you have that in mind at some point? Just ask Lee Cronin. This is his movie and these are his mummy issues.<\/p>\n<div class=\"enhancement\" data-click=\"enhancement\" data-align-center=\"\">\n<div class=\"infobox\" data-click=\"infoBox\" data-border-top=\"\" data-module-id=\"0000019d-9c39-d0dc-afbf-fc3b42e7000d\">\n<p class=\"infobox-title\">&#8220;Lee Cronin&#8217;s The Mummy&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"infobox-description\">English and Arabic, with subtitles<\/p>\n<p><b>evaluation: <\/b>R, strong and disturbing violent content, gore, brief drug use<\/p>\n<p><b>Execution time: <\/b>2 hours 13 minutes<\/p>\n<p><b>Performance: <\/b>Nationwide release on Friday, April 17th<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>#Review #Lee #Cronins #Hamunaptra #passion #project #embalming #committee<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How is Lee Cronin doing? Are you okay. You know, we&#8217;re still making movies. This is his third novel. Someone &#8211; maybe it was Lee Cronin himself, but probably not &#8211; wanted us to know that his latest project, Lee Cronin&#8217;s The Mummy, is more than just a mummy movie. Certainly not what you might &#8230; <a title=\"Review: &#8220;Lee Cronin&#8217;s &#8216;Hamunaptra&#8217; is more a passion project than embalming by committee.&#8221;\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/yasbou.com\/?p=541\" aria-label=\"Read more about Review: &#8220;Lee Cronin&#8217;s &#8216;Hamunaptra&#8217; is more a passion project than embalming by committee.&#8221;\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[891,899,904,900,903,894,901,895,898,890,643,886,896,887,889,902,888,893,613,561,892,897],"class_list":["post-541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-family","tag-billy-roy","tag-committee","tag-cronins","tag-embalming","tag-general-horror","tag-hamunaptra","tag-heart","tag-hypnosis-turn","tag-just-a-mummy-movie","tag-lee","tag-lee-cronin","tag-milly-shapiro","tag-mummy","tag-one","tag-passion","tag-precious-katie","tag-present-moment","tag-project","tag-review","tag-skin","tag-tv-reporter-charlie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yasbou.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yasbou.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yasbou.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yasbou.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yasbou.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yasbou.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yasbou.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yasbou.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yasbou.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yasbou.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}