Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026) | REVIEW

Natalie Grace as “Katie,” the titular mummy in LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY — PHOTO: Warner Bros. Pictures (Still image from trailers).

Directed by Lee Cronin — Screenplay by Lee Cronin.

Given that more than a dozen movies about a mummified corpse coming back to life have been released over the years, including but not limited to the Universal Classic Monsters films, you can’t just name your movie The Mummy anymore without confusing audiences. To distinguish their latest film from the multiple other films called The Mummy — including the iconic Boris Karloff-led original, the beloved Brendan Fraser-led action-adventure film from 1999, and the Tom Cruise-led 2017 film, which was designed to kickstart a shared universe of Universal Monsters (called the Dark Universe), which was cancelled as a result of that very 2017 film failing — producer Jason Blum suggested that they should put their writer-director’s name in the title of the film, despite Lee Cronin by no means being a household name, not even with many horror film fans. Cronin, however, did put himself on the map with his sophomore feature Evil Dead Rise, which was both a critical and box office success. Because I really liked his Evil Dead installment (and some pretty strong trailers), I was really excited to see his vision of The Mummy. Having now seen it, I can say that while there are things that I really liked here, this is a pretty significant step down from his aforementioned sophomore effort.

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REVIEW: Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Alyssa Sutherland’s Ellie in Deadite-form in EVIL DEAD RISE — PHOTO: Warner Bros. Pictures.

Directed by Lee Cronin — Screenplay by Lee Cronin.

Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead is one of my favorite horror franchises out there. I grew up watching Army of Darkness over and over again. This is a storied franchise capable of going both extremely gory and very zany. Yet in spite of the film series having been rebooted in 2013 by Fede Alvarez, it took another ten years for another Evil Dead film to come out (the franchise did continue as a relatively short-lived television series, though). Now, 30 years after the theatrical release of Army of Darkness and 10 years after the theatrical release of Alvarez’s Evil Dead, Irish writer-director Lee Cronin has been chosen to bring the deadites and the Book of the Dead into this decade, and he has done a brilliant job. Evil Dead Rise is a terrific continuation of the cult favorite franchise. Yes, it is indeed groovy. 

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