This is a movie about a man who fooled around with the pharaoh's
mistress and lived (and died, and lived again) to regret it. As his
punishment he is "mummified alive," sealed inside a sarcophagus with
thousands of flesh-eating beetles (which eat flesh "very slowly," we
learn). Millennia pass. In the 1920s, a French foreign legionnaire named
Rick meets a librarian named Evelyn, and joins with her and her brother
in an unwise quest to find Hamunaptra, the City of the Dead. (Sample
dialogue: "Are we talking about THE Hamunaptra?") They get into a race
with other fortune hunters, who have heard of untold treasure buried
beneath the sands, while meanwhile the descendants of the high priests,
who have guarded the city for 3,000 years, move against them.
There is good reason not to disturb the mummy, named Imhotep. If he is brought back to life, he will "arise a walking disease," we learn, and unleash the 10 proverbial plagues upon Egypt, of which in the course of the movie I counted locusts, fireballs from the sky, rivers running with blood, earthquakes, and flies. Also of course the flesh-eating beetles, although I was not certain whether they were a plague or came with the territory.
This 1999 mummy does indeed mumble something about his feelings for Evelyn, who may be descended from the pharaoh's mistress on her mother's side. But the bass on his voice synthesizer was set to "rumble," and so I was not quite sure what he said. It sounded vaguely affectionate, in the way that a pit bull growling over a T-bone sounds affectionate, but how can Imhotep focus on rekindling a 3,000-year-old romance when he has 10 plagues to unleash? There's a lot of funny dialogue in the movie, of which my favorite is a line of Evelyn's after she hears a suspicious noise in the museum library: "Abdul? Mohammed? Bob?" I liked the Goldfinger paint job on the priests in ancient Thebes. And the way a beetle burrowed in through a guy's shoe and traveled through his body, a lump under his flesh, until it could dine on his brain. And the way characters were always reading the wrong pages of ancient books and raising the dead by accident.
It was there that Seti's high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) - understandably infatuated with the Pharaoh's mistress Anck-Su-Namun (Patricia Velasquez), given her penchant for strolling about the palace using a pair of fishnets as a shirt - defied the gods with a ritual to reincarnate her body. It was there, too, where Imhotep himself was bound and entombed alive for his unholy acts, and cursed to remain locked in undead torment for eternity. Unless his sarcophagus is ever prized open.
There is good reason not to disturb the mummy, named Imhotep. If he is brought back to life, he will "arise a walking disease," we learn, and unleash the 10 proverbial plagues upon Egypt, of which in the course of the movie I counted locusts, fireballs from the sky, rivers running with blood, earthquakes, and flies. Also of course the flesh-eating beetles, although I was not certain whether they were a plague or came with the territory.
This 1999 mummy does indeed mumble something about his feelings for Evelyn, who may be descended from the pharaoh's mistress on her mother's side. But the bass on his voice synthesizer was set to "rumble," and so I was not quite sure what he said. It sounded vaguely affectionate, in the way that a pit bull growling over a T-bone sounds affectionate, but how can Imhotep focus on rekindling a 3,000-year-old romance when he has 10 plagues to unleash? There's a lot of funny dialogue in the movie, of which my favorite is a line of Evelyn's after she hears a suspicious noise in the museum library: "Abdul? Mohammed? Bob?" I liked the Goldfinger paint job on the priests in ancient Thebes. And the way a beetle burrowed in through a guy's shoe and traveled through his body, a lump under his flesh, until it could dine on his brain. And the way characters were always reading the wrong pages of ancient books and raising the dead by accident.
It was there that Seti's high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) - understandably infatuated with the Pharaoh's mistress Anck-Su-Namun (Patricia Velasquez), given her penchant for strolling about the palace using a pair of fishnets as a shirt - defied the gods with a ritual to reincarnate her body. It was there, too, where Imhotep himself was bound and entombed alive for his unholy acts, and cursed to remain locked in undead torment for eternity. Unless his sarcophagus is ever prized open.
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