"New Mummy Movie", a collaboration between underground Ukrainian and Russian auteurs Nikolay Yeryomin and Sergey A., is less a parody of Hollywood's "The Mummy" and more a fever dream spliced together from broken VFX reels and discarded voiceover tracks. Shot on what appears to be a budget of expired soda cans and Windows 98 software, this film is a chaotic spectacle of nonsensical storytelling, laughable effects, and characters who exist solely to die in increasingly baffling ways.
Plot? What Plot? The film devolves into a series of disconnected scenes: a CGI mummy (resembling a rejected "Skyrim" mod) awakens, characters spout exposition via monotone voiceover, and everyone dies-often mid-sentence.
The film's 3D models-crumbling temples, floating hieroglyphs, the mummy itself-look like they were ripped from a bargain-bin "Tomb Raider" knockoff. Textures glitch, polygons clip, and explosions resemble poorly rendered fireworks. It's so bad, it loops back into avant-garde art. With no coherent script, the film relies on a robotic narrator to explain everything. This voice becomes the film's accidental protagonist, a detached god mocking its own creation.
While intended to mock Hollywood's "The Mummy", the jokes (if any exist) drown in the chaos. Tom Cruise's charisma is replaced with actors staring blankly and the "action" scenes are so inept they feel like accidental satire. The mummy's jerky movements and dead-eyed stare are genuinely unsettling, like a haunted screensaver. Scenes cut abruptly to stock footage of deserts, then to a character drink vodka, then to a 3D scarab attack, then mummy in toilet paper. It's Dadaist cinema for the YouTube generation. If you grew up with early 2000s PC games, the film's "effects" might trigger a weirdly comforting sense of déjà vu.
Yeryomin and Sergey A. Are no strangers to low-budget absurdity, but "New Mummy Movie" feels like a parody of their own filmmaking. It's a sibling to Tommy Wiseau's "The Room"-a film so earnestly bad it becomes a cult artifact. "New Mummy Movie" is a trainwreck, but one that's impossible to look away from. It fails as a parody, a horror film, and a coherent narrative, yet its sheer incompetence makes it a perversely entertaining time capsule of DIY filmmaking gone rogue.
A glorious mess. Recommended only for masochists, bad movie clubs, or anyone who's ever wondered, "What if Ed Wood directed a video game cutscene?"
"The mummy's curse is... (long pause) ...real." - The narrator, delivering the line with the enthusiasm of a GPS voice.
