The Rise of the Mummy (2021)

From what has to be the busiest period of British horror filmmaking in history, shuffles The Rise of the Mummy, formally known as Mummy Resurgence, a film that has a slight connection to 2019’s The Mummy Reborn.  It is made by the same producer Scott Jeffrey, and brings back the same mummy costume, if not the same mummy character, from the earlier film.  Now, fortunately this is only a slight connection, because while I have to admit to being a pushover when it comes to modern day British horror, The Mummy Reborn was one I struggled to get through.  That one was an in your face, out and out comedy that courted the youth market, and suggests out and out comedy and being  down with the kids wasn’t these peoples’ strong point.  One thought that ran through my mind while watching The Mummy Reborn was “this is such a great mummy costume… albeit rather derivative of the Eddie character from Iron Maiden albums… if only they’d gone in the direction of a straight horror movie instead”.  Fortunately this second Mummy outing does give Eddie from Iron Maiden a more dignified British horror film to do his thing in.  Fingers crossed Iron Maiden’s lawyers never see either of these films though.

I’m still not sure I’d completely classify The Rise of the Mummy as a totally straight horror movie.  It does ditch allot of the BBC3 level comedy that marred The Mummy Reborn.  Tonally, this is more in the lineage of films like Horror Hospital and Psychomania.  Films that work as straight horror if that’s what you want them to be, but also have a cheeky sense of humour to them, and are happy if you want to laugh along with them too.  Make no mistake, this is an utterly preposterous film, that seems quite aware of its own absurdity. 

The Rise of the Mummy opens with three people being pursued through woodlands by a Egyptian mummy, and performing a ritual involving a severed heart, the spreading of Pettex Roman Gravel on the ground, and reading out loud from a book.  All of which is meant to lift the Mummy’s curse and render it immobile.  Pettex Roman Gravel incidentally is what is used in the bottom of Fish Aquariums, but according to this film also comes in handy for undoing a Mummy’s curse…okay.  All this has the desired effect of stopping the Mummy in its tracks, but then the army shows up and kills everyone, in a gung-ho attempt to recapture the Mummy and prevent the truth from coming out.  So, try to follow this logic, the army are fully aware of the threat the Mummy poses to the public, and are willing to murder civilians in order to hush this up, and yet after the opening credits have rolled, we discover that the Mummy has been sold to a university, once again putting the public at risk.  While one of the university’s teachers Miss Dawson (Amanda-Jade Tyler) frets that most of the university’s budget was spent on buying this Mummy, they also just leave it lying about on a classroom desk, under a cloth.  I guess it would have stretched the university’s budget a little too much to have ponied up for a sarcophagus.  Miss Dawson is given the thankless task of teaching Egyptology to a bunch of dim witted students.  The hook that is meant to engage these students into coming into contact with this moldy old Mummy is that this is a once in a life time opportunity to study an undocumented Mummy, and that they may become well respected archeologists on the back of their studies.  I tend to think Miss Dawson is being wildly optimistic there though, given that she has to point out to them that Egypt is a “pretty hot country” at one point, it doesn’t feel like we’re dealing with the future brains of Britain here.  You certainly don’t get the impression that anyone here is destined for greatness on the back of this university course, a ‘mummies for dummies’ course if you will. 

Of the students, Holly (Abi Casson Thompson) is signposted early on as the one who is going to go the distance, by virtue of the fact that she is allocated a background story.  Holly having a brother who is bi-polar and eventually takes his own life.  A subplot that does tie this in slightly to The Mummy Reborn, whose heroine had a brother with severe autism issues, although the manner in which these films tackle these issues couldn’t be more different.  The Mummy Reborn used the autism subplot as broad comic relief, whereas the brother’s mental problems and death are portrayed in a far more serious fashion here, and has clearly been intended to add a bit of dramatic weight to the proceedings.  The rest of the students are a less well defined bunch, there is Kira (Mya Brown) who is good for a few snarky comments and has amazing eyebrows.  Holly’s boyfriend, the token American (modern British horror being sweet on having American characters, or at least American accented ones).  There is also Jessie (Megan Purvis) who wears a coat that looks as if it belongs to a second hand car salesman, and Lyne (Barbara Dabson) who initially appears to be the sniveling coward of the bunch, hiding in the toilets at the first sign of trouble, but then does a 180 and proves to be quite handy with a baseball bat later on in the film.

Between them these meddling kids accidentally manage to bring the Mummy back to life, thanks to a combination of messing around with his bling, and Holly reading out loud from an ancient book that the Mummy came with, this Mummy obviously having been sold with added accessories.  So, soon ol’ dusty bollocks is up and running again and terrorizing the students of this so-called University.  A University that never quite convinces as a University, instead looking like the High School that it is in real life.  They even goof at one point and leave in a shot that reveals the name of the actual shooting location…Archbishop Tenison’s Church of England School.  Which I believe has previously been used as an actual High School setting in another Scott Jeffrey production ‘Cupid’, and checking out the trailer to his upcoming film ‘The Wishing Demon’ reveals it has also been used as a location in that one as well.  So evidentially Archbishop Tenison’s Church of England School is quite the hub of British horror filmmaking at the moment, I’m sure the Archbishop will be turning in his grave, but then again I don’t suppose High Schools are being used for anything else at the moment.

I did get an unexpected buzz of nostalgia from The Rise of the Mummy.  I’m a child of the 1980s, and automatically assumed that today’s high schools would be flashier, trendier affairs, closer to the glamorous American high schools you used to see in movies back then.  On the basis of The Rise of the Mummy though, little about British high schools appears to have changed since the 1980s, they are still as mundane, cold and impersonal as they were back then, Grange Hill style vibes abound from this film’s location.  Which is to the film’s benefit, dropping an Egyptian Mummy into such an otherwise dull and unmistakably British location makes for an often striking juxtaposition. 

To give credit where it is due, The Rise of the Mummy is quick witted and a fast talker when it comes to providing excuses for its budgetary shortcomings.  The script manages to get round any awkward questions over why there are only a handful of students and teachers in this ahem… University –that just happens to have a sign saying Archbishop Tenison’s Church of England School in the middle of it- by having the Mummy plunge the location into a time loop.  Meaning that time is frozen and no one can enter or leave the building for a 24 hour period.  Whenever one of the gang attempt to leave through the University’s reception doors, they reappear in the reception, Groundhog Day style, a few moments later.  The Rise of the Mummy also gets around killing off characters on a regular basis whilst still keeping its very small cast around, by bringing the Mummy’s victims back as sightless, snarling zombie like slaves, who get deputized into doing most of the slow moving creature’s dirty work.

Should anyone be keeping count, The Rise of the Mummy also marks another Brit horror appearance by Youtube Vlogger ‘Coolduder’, or as he is known in the non-viral world Shawn C. Phillips.  Like a bargain basement Nick Fury, Phillips’ Vlogger character has so far shown up in multiple British horror films (via various characters’ laptops) forever on hand to explain the origins of whichever monster the Brits are up against this week.  So far his know-it-all Vlogger character has worn the hat of a mermaid expert in The Mermaid’s Curse, a witch expert in The Candy Witch, a tooth fairy expert in The Tooth Fairy, a scarecrow expert in Bride of Scarecrow, and a leprechaun expert in The Leprechaun’s Game.  Here he adds yet another feather to his cap as a font of all knowledge on Mummies and Egyptology, while at the same time providing a case for all these low budget British horror films being part of a shared, cinematic universe.  There is a hilarious moment when they cut between Coolduder dishing out information on Mummies, which is delivered in his customary, excitable, rosy cheeked fashion, and the facial reactions of Kira, she of the amazing eyebrows.  Kira looks bored out of her mind and not unjustly questions why when they are stuck in a time loop and being stalked by a Mummy, they are taking time out to listen to this manic American rabbit on and on about Mummies via a laptop.  All of which incenses Holly, who shuts Kira down by yelling “bitch, watch” at her.  Which does seem a little out of character, not to mention a bit rude, considering that Holly and Kira are meant to be best friends, and Kira has been Holly’s shoulder to cry on during her brother’s death, but she still gets called a bitch for talking over a Coolduder video anyway.  I guess Coolduder must command a pretty high level of devotion from his online followers. 

‘Current events’ do seem to have left their mark on The Rise of the Mummy, and forced the cast into masks for a number of scenes.  The narrative excuse that they give for this is that because the Mummy is old and moldy, it may be giving off toxic fumes, therefore people need to mask up when they are in close proximity to it.  However these ‘rules’ aren’t abided to throughout the film, in some scenes people don’t seem to be concerned about being close to the Mummy without a mask, other times every cast member is masked up.  No idea what was happening being the scenes, but to hazard a guess I’d say that filming guidelines became more stringent as the production progressed.  It does feel like events beyond the filmmakers control forced this aspect onto the production, rather than this being a deliberate attempt to hold a mirror up to the events of 2020.  As such it is a pity that this ‘masks on’ aspect will forever timestamp this as a 2020 production, a year that, let’s face it, we were all happy to wave goodbye too.

Something I’ve found with Scott Jeffrey is that the films he directs tend to be of a higher quality than the ones where he is only the producer.  It feels like the directed ones are the films where his funds, time and creativity are poured into.  On the other hand, the producer ones, like this, are more cheap and cheerful affairs that carry the impression of being thrown together in a slapdash manner.  I mean, with The Rise of the Mummy, you have a fairly small cast, an off-season high school location and a pre-existing Mummy costume, it looks like something that was quick and easy to put together, as a sideline in-between directing his own films.  In terms of the films he has directed…Don’t Speak…Cupid…Clowndoll…The Final Scream and the more recent Hellkat, Jeffrey is going from strength to strength and has the kind of track record that earmarks him as one of the most promising talents to emerge from this period of British horror filmmaking.  The Rise of the Mummy, I think is likely to be remembered as a slight and fairly lightweight title in his filmography, but c’mon there is still lots of fun to be had here.  I remember a couple of years ago, someone remarking that Moonstalker starring Cliff Twemlow was the closest Britain ever came to making a Don Dohler movie, but if anything I think The Rise of the Mummy comes closer to being a Dohler movie relocated to a British setting.  Like a Dohler film, The Rise of the Mummy doesn’t cheat when it comes to showing off its creature, it is not shy of putting the Mummy right there in the first scene-and after a brief downtime for the bereavement subplot to play out- amounts to a very simplistic, creature feature runaround.  In the past when British films tried to do creature features, like Proteus, Grim and Breeders from the 1990s, it seemed like they could never fully shake off the British reserve and enter into the B-Movie ethos in the same way that low budget filmmakers across the pond were able to.  Hang ups that Jeffrey’s generation of filmmakers appear to have thrown aside, and whole heartedly embraced the trashy, having taken to making very unpretentious horror movies like ducks to water.  Maybe now, more than ever though, we all need a silly B-movie diversion from real life once in a while, and let’s face it diversions don’t come sillier than Eddie from Iron Maiden stalking people around a Grange Hill School that is caught up in a Groundhog Day style time-loop…do they?