We’re just over a week into this year’s Halloween Horrors series, and so far have encountered killer birds, power-hungry Cold War-era scientists, toxic hooch, two different looks at the practice of exorcism, and an extreme variation on one of horror’s most legendary monsters. Today’s series entry takes a look at another classic monster, one whose history some might even call “universal”. Ahem.

Today, Bill Van Ryn rejoins our series for a 5th year, this time taking a look at the subject of mummies. Well, one mummy, to be exact. The ancient shambler of tombs gets a dose of Euro-gore injected into its story as Bill presents a look at Dawn of the Mummy. Although released in 1981, a year that saw countless classics of 1980s’ horror make their debut, Dawn of the Mummy somehow remains relatively obscure, but hopefully this review will help the film find a few new fans.

As I’m certain many of our regular readers will know, Bill Van Ryn is the creator and curator of the Groovy Doom Facebook page (and Instagram account), as well as the creator and editor of the fanzine Drive-In Asylum, which frequently sees contributions from a number of writers featured in this year’s Halloween Horrors series. You can also catch Bill and Sam Panico (whose contribution to this series will be posting later this month) each Saturday night at 8pm EST for the Drive-In Asylum Double Feature on the Groovy Doom Facebook page and YouTube account.

 

Dawn of the Mummy
Review by Bill Van Ryn

Movie monsters like vampires, zombies, and werewolves seem to get way more coverage than another standby, the dusty old shuffling mobile mummy.  Yes, I know – Brendan Fraser and Tom Cruise might disagree, but THOSE aren’t the kind of mummy movies I want to see, dammit. I’d rather see a bandaged cadaver limping stiffly down a torch-lit corridor in an old tomb instead of swirling CGI dust storms and Indiana Jones style adventure. That’s why Dawn of the Mummy and I get along so well. It understands me. It gets me.

All of the classic genre cliches are here, including an opening sequence where we see the burial of a Pharoah and a curse being placed on anyone who would enter the tomb and steal the riches being buried with him. Millennia pass, and then a bunch of 20th century dolts blast open the tomb. Naturally, nobody heeds the warning of an old lady named Xena, who just happens to look like the high priestess who sealed the thing up thousands of years prior.  She is wearing the makeup of an old hag, but actually she looks pretty good for all the centuries that have gone by.  Aside from the crooks who blasted the tomb open, the site immediately begins attracting other random grave robbers of all sorts and – perhaps worse – a team of American fashion models, who use the tomb for an on-location photo shoot.  Mayhem ensues after the hot lights used by the fashion crew revive the mummy.

Yes, Dawn of the Mummy gives you exactly what you were expecting, and possibly a little more. You see, the Pharoah has a posse of henchmen – actually slaves that were rounded up prior to the burial and forced to participate. Murdered by poison gas afterward, they were promised resurrection should the mummy ever rise for vengeance, and boy do they ever. In one of the movie’s best moments, they climb out of the sand dunes surrounding the tomb en masse, and this is when we realize that Dawn of the Mummy is also a zombie movie.  The mummy and his cohorts eat human flesh, and there are some surprisingly gory moments, such as a great shock that occurs during a wedding ceremony when the mummies decide the bride would look better wearing red, and lots of it.

Director Frank Agrama, who was born an Egyptian (he passed away a US citizen in April of this year at the age of 93) actually shot the movie in Egypt, with an Italian film crew, and at times Dawn of the Mummy feels like an Italian zombie movie. The makeup and gore FX are pretty damn good – Maurizio Trani, one of Fulci’s makeup artists from Zombi 2, is on staff here, and it shows. There are also a few minor but interesting twists going on, such as the fact that the High Priestess has somehow survived into the 20th century, and also a new supernatural power the zombies possess: wherever they touch a living person, the flesh begins to rot. The same thing must have happened to me, except Dawn of the Mummy caused it to happen to my brain – popular online opinion seems to be that this movie is of the MST3K “let’s talk over the movie” variety. Whatever the naysayers think, I say this is a great movie to watch during the Halloween season. It doesn’t quite have the gorgeous look of a Fulci film, or travel too far into his particular realm of the morbidly absurd, but it’s got a similar structure. Once it gets going, it doesn’t stop until there are guts all over the village square.  You gotta respect that.