• Produced and directed by Frank Agrama
• Written by Frank Agrama, Ronald Dobrin, and Daria Price
• Starring
  • Brenda King
  • Barry Sattels
  • George Peck
  • John Salvo
  • Ibrahim Khan

Longtime readers will have noticed that I have not included any mummy movies in my long-running Month of the Living Dead series of Video Binges. The reason for this is simple: mummies don’t count. I mean, technically, they could probably qualify as zombies. Dead? Check. Reanimated? Check. Shambling? Check. I’m sure that they could discover their niche within the continuum of voodoo slaves and bacterium-revived cadavers that dwell comfortably within the zombie spectrum. But mummies have always been a fairly exclusive subset, carved out with their own rules and cliches, and they don’t mix well with the riffraff. (And you’ve certainly never seen a zombie, either voodoo-powered or Romeroesque, mistake a modern lab assistant or archeologist’s daughter for the reincarnation of his millennia-dead love.) If we were to admit mummies into the zombie genre, then some bright upstart would use that as precedent to argue that vampires should also be included as zombies due to feature overlap, and that way lies madness.

So I must reassure you that the inclusion of Dawn of the Mummy as part of this year’s Month of the Living Dead is not in recognition of the mummy as a zombie. Rather, it’s because in addition to the singular mummy, there are also hordes of zombies to be had — non-bandaged, gutmunching undead. The titular mummy is merely the cherry on top.

YeeeeHAW!

The movie opens, as befits the conventions of the mummy genre, in Egypt, 3000 B.C. And lo and behold, this movie set in Egypt was actually shot in Egypt. The “3000 B.C.” part is a little shakier, as the Pyramids of Giza visible in the background is, as in modern times, bereft of the outer casing stones that were the original finish. (Let’s leave aside the fact that the Pyramid of Cheops wasn’t even constructed for another three and a half centuries.)

Anyway. Even in 3000 B.C., the main character is already dead, and we watch his embalming as a High Priestess (Laila Nasr) chants funeral dirges above the body. We can assume that the guest of honor is the pharaoh (moreso if we get all academic and point out that funerary rights giving the deceased the promise of resurrection through the power of Osiris were limited to the pharaoh in the Old Kingdom), but the rites that the high priestess intones aren’t the standard ones about safe passage through the underworld; no, she places a curse on any that violate his resting place and promises the pharaoh he’ll be able to come back and kill with his army of the undead any who violate his tomb.

By the way, the pharaoh’s name is (as near as I can tell) Sefirama, and nobody knows how to pronounce it. The high priestess and a few people later in the movie render it “se-FIR-a-MA,” which sounds a lot like “Sefira-Man.” (The Lower Nile’s first superhero!) Others pronounce it “SE-fi-RA-ma.” I think the only suitable joke here is, “Call me whatever you want, just don’t call me late for lunch!”

So Sefirama is wrapped up and entombed, and the high priestess consigns the embalmers and servants to death to protect the whereabouts of the tomb (never mind that pharaohs of the Old Kingdom worked hard to make sure everybody knew where they were buried — again, Great Pyramids, anybody? — and it wasn’t until the New Kingdom that, cognizant of grave robbery, pharaonic burials too place in hidden locations like the Valley of the Kings). The half-dozen servants obediently die from poison gas as the tomb seals itself up, and the high priestess wanders off.

“Are you sure the Jeep is rated for that kind of payload?”

Cut to the present day, when professional grave robber Rick (Barry Sattels) and his two Egyptian henchmen Tarik and Kasim (don’t know and don’t know — the closing credits aren’t complete) blow the front off the hidden tomb. Sattels as Rick immediately shows that his preferred method of excavation is chewing the scenery, as his is a “livelier” performance than the entire rest of the cast combined, living and dead. Rick knows about the poison gas (which stays potent for five thousand years?), and thus sets the two of them to guard the location while it airs out. Round about this time, they’re accosted by Zena (Laila Nasr again), the local crazy woman, who starts raving about Sefirama’s curse until she’s driven off. In other words, looks like all the high priestess’s efforts to keep the location secret fell flat.

Zena then appeals to some other locals who’ve worked for Rick before and feel cut out of the current expedition, so they go to the site, bypass Tarik and Kasim who’ve fallen into a drunken stupor, and enter the tomb — only to have their faces melt off! (Again, that’s pretty potent poison gas.)

In the morning, Rick and his cohorts enter the tomb and bypass all of the mundane artifacts, wall-carvings, etc. They’re here for one thing: gold. They’re set to ransack the place until they find where the gold is hidden. And the only thing that can stop them?

A fashion shoot!

See, the producers went to great expense to spend some time in New York, just so we’d be introduced to Lisa (Brenda King), a fashion model, and Bill (George Peck) a photographer. Also, Joan, Melinda and Gary (Dianne Beatty, Ellen Faison and John Salvo), three other models, and Jenny (Joan Levy), Bill’s assistant and makeup girl. Only Lisa and Bill are introduced in the context of a fashion shoot (she’s on roller skates, and is so skinny you can see through her); the others are first shown to us participating in that most Big Applish of activities, crossing the street. Then we get a stock-footage airplane and a voiceover telephone call explaining they’re all on their way to shoot in Egypt. Boy, that’s great entertainment value out of their production time in New York! (Notable for a zombie movie not shot domestically, all of the principals actually appear to be speaking English with their own voices. That’s about the nicest thing you can say about the acting.)

“Dude! These are some gnarly cartouches!”

Having arrived in Egypt, our set of fashionistas drive by the Pyramids with a yawn, and head out into the trackless desert for their shoot. And darned if they don’t stop right in front of Rick’s illegal dig — close enough that Kasim assumes them to be rival treasurehunters and starts shooting at them. When Rick intervenes and reassures them that, no, no one really wants to puncture them, they immediately show their New Yorker attitude: “Hey, nice tomb! I think we’ll shoot here!” Rick really can’t protest, because if he causes a stink, they just might go back to town to complain and inadvertently alert the authorities to his activities. (Especially since Bill indicates that they’ve been given carte-blanche to shoot where they want in the entire area. I guess the Ministry of Antiquities was a lot softer in those days.)

Now. I’ve told you about the coherent parts of the movie. No, really. Now, when the supernatural stuff starts kicking in, is when things start to happen that makes absolutely no sense. My guess is that the three credited screenwriters simply took turns writing successive scenes, without checking what the other collaborators had already gotten on paper. That, couple with the attitude that, “Aw, it’s just a crummy mummy/zombie flick, no one in the drive-in’s gonna care if it makes any sense,” gives the rest of the movie the feel that you’re missing a scene or three for every one that you see, and those ones are out of order.

Wanna know what wakes up the mummy? So do I. It’s not the discovery of his tomb, of even of his personal self in his sarcophagus. Heck, it’s not even Rick’s whispered taunts that he’s going to get his hands on all of Safirama’s gold. No, it’s lights. The bright lights that Rick and crew haul into the tomb for the fashion shoot, because nothing says “high-powered fashion imagery” like a dessicated corpse in between the models. (On the other hand, the inclusion of a mummy does make the models look less morbidly skinny.) The lights go on all day, and without anyone noticing, the mummy starts leaking steaming fluids through its wrappings. Moral of the story? Mummies are made out of butter.

Because the movie would be over much too soon if the mummy just sat up and yelled at all of you kids to get offa my lawn, we’ve got the requisite spooky filler stuff: Jenny accidentally spills a canopic jar, and the still-moist contents (!) give her hand a nasty chemical burn (!). Something guts one of the horses the fashion models brought with them. Melinda develops an instant attraction for Rick. (Okay, that last one’s not spooky, but it is filler that makes little sense.) Eventually, after a couple of days’ shooting in the tomb — and you have to wonder how clueless Bill and crew are to think that they can waltz in and bring someone’s work to a standstill for days on end — the mummy finally rises! And boy, is he thin! He looks like the guy in gym class that everyone hopes is good at basketball because he’s too gawky and uncoordinated for anything else.

“You rang?”

He also walks just like we’ve come to expect mummies to walk, like they’d got yardsticks strapped to every limb. But fortunately, Sefirama’s got an army of the undead, who are a little more spry. They’re not, as I had predicted, they six guys trapped in his tomb five thousand years ago (whose bodies are nowhere in evidence — did the poison gas dissolve their bodies completely?); instead, they’re an indeterminate number of guys who rise out of the sand, bald and rotten-faced and dressed raggedly. And they proceed to do not much, really, for the first couple of nights — molest a horse, kill a person or two when separated from the group, the kind of stuff that the undead do to bide time until the climactic scenes when they pull out all the stops.

And when they do, they attack both the fashion shoot camp (yup, having models camp out for days in a row really makes them fresh for a shoot), and the nearby town during a wedding party (interrupting the performance of a bellydancer who is, shall we say, authentically large). And it doesn’t matter that these zombies are the servants of a long-buried pharaoh, they still behave like post-Romero zombies, i.e., they eat their victims.

This, and in fact many of the elements of the movie, make sense when you realize that there are an awful lot of Italian names in the credits. Suddenly, you know how to classify this movie: despite the fact that director Agrama is a native Egyptian, at heart this movie is one of the uncountable Italian-produced or co-produced zombie films that glutted the world in the wake of Dawn of the Dead (1978); it just had an Egyptian location instead of the standard Caribbean or Philippine island, and an extra gimmick.

The traditional wedding buffet.

I didn’t mention the midnight swim in the lagoon by a couple of models (not a skinny-dip, sorry), or Gary’s long excursion into town for weed, or Sefirama’s truly astounding offscreen teleportation powers (he’s seen shuffling through an alley in town, far enough from camp that it’s a major excursion in a jeep, on the same evening that he kills someone in the tomb). I’d love to go into detail on such things, but mentioning them where they fall in the narrative would look as random and disjointed as… well, as the movie.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 27, plus 1 horse
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 6
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• boom mikes: 1
• actors who’ve been on Star Trek: 0