Whenever the name of a director is made part of a movie’s official title, it’s only fair to expect the presentation of a unique vision. The name signals the creation of something only they can make, something that sets them apart from the rest. Lee Cronin has earned that distinction rather quickly, with only three feature films in the bag (plus a handful of short films and some TV work thrown in for good measure). Evil Dead Rise (2023) was the movie that turned him into a name, and it’s now attached to the title of the latest attempt at reviving a classic Universal monster: The Mummy.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a strange film, more in terms of concept than in actual content. It seeks to reinterpret the Egyptian creature in radical fashion, and it does. It changes everything, from the way the bandages work to the purpose of mummification. Unfortunately, it borrows too heavily from other horror classics to come off as original. Ultimately, the movie suffers too much for it, making for something way less original than the title suggests.

The story follows TV reporter Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) and his family while he’s on assignment in Egypt. One day, a strange woman lures his daughter Katie (Natalie Grace) away from their home. Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) is brought in to investigate Katie’s disappearance, a woman that hopes to specialize in missing persons cases.

Katie is found eight years later, inside an ancient sarcophagus. She should be dead, but she isn’t. She’s malnourished, disfigured, and near catatonic. Charlie takes her home to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he hopes the warmth afforded by family can help her heal and recover. But something’s inside Katie, and it’s eager to spread its evil as cruelly as possible.

Cronin should be applauded for approaching The Mummy with a mind to push certain established ideas to their limit. There are no corpses wrapped up in white wraps shambling around in this one, no killer scarabs or locust swarms. The story swaps labyrinthian pyramids and quicksand for a two-story house in a New Mexican desert. Things are more intimate as a result, more focused on family rather than on the spread of an ancient evil possessed by an insatiable hunger.

The problem lies in Cronin’s decision to use the building blocks of long-established, highly recognizable films in the process of crafting his own. It’s done to the point of compromising his own attempts at innovation. To watch Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is to watch a combination of The Exorcist, Se7en, and Cronin’s own Evil Dead Rise. Of the three, though, Evil Dead is the most obvious, most notably in terms of Katie’s look and behavior.

In Evil Dead Rise, Cronin presents the Deadites (the possessed humans affected by the Necronomicon’s incantations) as decaying bags of flesh with a penchant for self-mutilation. They’re gleefully evil, happy to be spreading death and mayhem. They’re disturbingly raunchy, too, as they taunt and mock the living with grotesqueries that are meant to drive them mad.

The possessed Katie in The Mummy is essentially a Deadite. She moves, talks, and taunts her family in almost the same way as the possessed in Evil Dead. A few pages are taken from The Exorcist’s own possessed girl, Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), especially during scenes when Katie is on her bed, staring blankly at the people around her before snapping with a bite to the forearm or a headbutt. The gist of it is, a combination of very obvious influences doesn’t always lead to something original.

Se7en comes in during a particular scene in Egypt involving a violent run-in with a key suspect and a box. This one’s not as blatant as it is in Katie’s case, but the nudge is more like a push here too. Detective Zaki gets a chance to shine in this sequence, but then she’s just asked to homage a scene from another movie more with little space afforded for originality.

It also bears mentioning that there was a more interesting movie in Zaki’s story. Turning The Mummy into a dark and gritty detective story could’ve led to some interesting places, complete with an opportunity to perhaps explore other aspects of Egypt that get sidelined way too often in these kinds of films.

While Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has some intense horror sequences and some interesting characters at its core, it’s more of a Frankenstein’s Monster of a movie. It’s multiple parts, all done better elsewhere, grafted together under the guise of a new interpretation. That said, if you watch the movie as strictly a new Evil Dead entry, you should be fine.