aka Talos the Mummy
- Directed by Russell Mulcahy
- Written by John Esposito and Russell Mulcahy
- Starring
- Jason Scott Lee
- Louise Lombard
- Sean Pertwee
- Lysette Anthony
- Produced by Silvio Muraglia, Daniel Sladek, and Jeffrey White
Poor Russell Mulcahy. Like so many young ‘n’ hot directors these days, he got his start directing music videos (won awards for his Duran Duran videos, actually), then tried to translate his visual skills into feature films. After a couple of training films (including Razorback (1984)), he had his immortal sleeper hit, Highlander (1986), due largely to the fact that the script handed to him was perfectly focused, and perfectly suited to the visual strengths of a music video director.
And after that, well, he never hit his pinnacle again. Highlander 2 (1991) was, of course, a horrendous bit of contractual obligation; The Shadow (1994) misfired largely because he tried to infuse this almost-godlike pulp hero with a softer human side (note to touchie-feelie types: the Shadow was not a human being, he was a force of nature — don’t try to give him a “human” side!), and in between most of his movies have ended up on the video store rack marked “Blah.”
According to what I’ve heard (I read it somewhere, so it must be true), Mulcahy’s goal was to put on film the image that filled the Hammer Films’ poster for their version of The Mummy, an image which was, alas, beyond the technical abilities of the Hammer filmmakers to put in the actual film: a beam of light shining right through a hole in the mummy’s abdomen, like so:
2) The shot occurs two-thirds of the way through Tale of the Mummy, by which point the audience has already been numbed by the tepid pace, overly complicated plotline, and various improbabilities.
Here’s the plot in a nutshell: in 1946, an expedition led by Sir Richard Turkel (Christopher Lee, in an inspired bit of cameo casting) finds an isolated tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Turkel and two companions venture into the tunnel to break the seal, and the curse gets them — they literally start crumbling away, cracking like bisque-fired pottery. as his last act, Turkel detonates an explosion which caves the tunnel in, keeping the curse held in…
Until 1999, when an expedition led by Turkel’s daughter Samantha re-excavates the site. Clad in environmental suits, she and three companions — Dr. Claire Mulroney (the always beautiful Lysette Anthony), semi-psychic Bred Cortese (Sean Pertwee, son of the Dr. Who actor), and a cannon fodder schmuck (Sam’s fiance, naturally) — make the descent, guided from the surface by Prof. Marcus (Michael Lerner, “Mayor Ebert” of the imposter Godzilla). They break open the crypt to find that it’s an immense room, the distant floor littered with seven bodies, and suspended in the middle is the stone sarcophagus of Talos.
Immediately, Brad goes crazy from the weird flashbacks of torture he starts having; meanwhile, fiance-boy climbs out to grab an Eye of Ra amulet from a corpse for Sam and plummets to his death.
Fast forward seven months to London, where two things are happening: the Talos exhibit is open at the museum, and a four-planet conjunction is coming together (that would be Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, one assumes, though I don’t know that the Egyptians had knowledge of Mercury — it’s pretty hard to see unaided), just as drawn on the ceiling of Talos’ crypt. The sarcophagus is open on display, showing that nothing but wrappings has survived of Talos. The power flickers, and — gasp! — the wrappings are gone!
Police discover the dead body of a U.S. Senator at the museum with his eyes removed. As an international courtesy, American detective Riley (Jason Scott Lee), stationed in London, is put on the case.
Another immigrant is soon murdered, this time missing lungs.
Brad is back, crazier than ever, with the symbols of the conjunction tattooed on his shaven head. He tries to convince everyone that Talos is coming, better watch out, but no one believes his rantings.
Except maybe Sam. She and Riley discover that the organs being harvested are in a particular order, the order in which they were removed from mummified bodies, seven organs in all. While Brad is desperately trying to head off the killings, Riley and the police suspect Brad and try to catch him.
Now, here’s the kicker: The killings are being done by the wrappings! that’s right, CGI-animated wrappings crawl spider-like across ceilings, sneak under doors, and wrap themselves around their victims. The wrappings grow more humanoid with each killing.
Finally, when Riley catches Brad, Brad shares the whole sordid story of Talos, a Greek exiled to Egypt 3000 years ago. With his strange rituals, Talos sought immortality; he had seven of his followers eat specific organs from his body as he died, and now he’s back, tracking the reincarnations of his followers and collecting his organs back. Once he has all seven back, he will be transmuted into an imperishable, immortal deity figure.
I’ll stop my synopsis right there, so as not to ruin the movie’s few thrills. Instead, my assessment:
Good Things
It seems to be a law that mummy flicks must center on reincarnation, and this is no exception, but at least they don’t trot out the tired old “reincarnation of the mummy’s lost love” plot.
Lysette Anthony is, as always, beautiful.
The special effects of Sir Richard and friends crumbling were novel and effective.
Sean Pertwee does a commendable job as a frantic, borderline personality who just happens to be right.
The CGI wrappings take some interesting forms, such as when they become a spider-like form to crawl across ceilings.
A good setup and follow-through when Brad says that one of the followers of Talos came back as a dog — no need to come back in the same form as before. This becomes important in the last scene.
Bad Things — heavens, where do I begin?
In the first place, let me reiterate: Talos is Greek. The name is Greek (as I shouted when I first heard it — “That’s not Egyptian! Would it have hurt you to open any old Wallis Budge book and crib an authentic name?”), and the character is Greek, and the theology is — well, not Greek, but not Egyptian either. The organ removal quoted as Egyptian is not; the Egyptians removed four organs, not seven, and kept them in preserved jars with the mummy. There’s absolutely no reason to have this be a story about mummies.
But what about the wrappings? Well, what about them? Why should the wrappings house the soul of Talos? Anyone who knows Egyptian mythology knows that it’s the body itself that is important — not the removed organs, and certainly not the wrappings. It’s a visual gimmick, nothing more; in effect, this is a mummy movie without a mummy.
Next: Jason Scott Lee plays an American cop named Riley. I repeat: Jason Scott Lee plays someone of Irish descent. That’s the opposite of John Carradine playing a Chinese character, and just as ridiculous. I know, the script was written before Lee was cast, but would it have been hard to rename the character something vaguely, noncommitally, possibly Asian — like, perhaps, “Lee”? On top of that, would an American cop be running the show on a multiple murder investigation in London? I mean, he’s brought in because of the Senator, but the Senator isn’t even mentioned after five minutes, and Riley runs the show on the rest of the murder investigations; he even has a British partner. His presence is finally (and lamely) explained in the closing minutes, but come now — do American audiences absolutely need an American lead? Couldn’t they have gotten someone with a good reason to be in Britain, like maybe a Brit?
There’s too much plot and not enough story. Riley is trying to catch Brad and finds out the mythology of Talos along the way; Sam is falling for Riley and trying to keep an objective stance about it all; the other former members of the expedition each have their scenes, Brad brings in a psychic advisor to help him, Talos collects his organs while offing people who piss him off (like Brad), and then captures Sam for, really, no good reason (I know, the last scene tries desperately to make it seem like it was for a good reason, but it wasn’t).
The wraps don’t stay constant. When actual props are shown, they’re brown strips of what looks like wet rayon (not at all like the rough linen used to wrap mummies); in the CGI sequences, the brown tint is gone, and they look like a mass of newspaper strips.
Unfollowed plot threads: Both Sir Richard’s journal/logbook and the Eye of Ra amulet are mentioned as big deals, but never amount to much.
Four characters go into the requisite abandoned building site to confront Talos. What’s the first thing someone says? “Let’s split up!” Aarrgh…
And finally, in the last scenes, Talos appears, mostly reconstructed but still oddly deformed. I know he’s supposed to be grotesque, but to me he looked like exactly what he was: a man in a silly-looking rubber suit, with a head that was an obvious puppet for close-ups. Given that they cribbed so much of the central idea from the original Hellraiser, they should have gone ahead and cribbed that make-up design as well, it being much more realistic.
To sum up: It’s disappointing that, in his quest to display a single scene (which was brief and understated — if you didn’t know the story, you wouldn’t have thought it significant), a director will put together such a pointless mishmash to fill out the other 87 minutes. (And by the way, while the US cut runs 88 minutes, the UK cut is 119 minutes, and the Spanish cut 122 minutes — my heart goes out to the European audiences.)
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 15, plus 1 dog
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 1
- dream sequences: 0 / psychic flashes: 3
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
