🧂 Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026)

A gross out endurance test wearing a classic monster's name.

Written and directed by Lee Cronin. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. 2026.

🧂 Salt: 8 / 10. A disgrace to the name, and proof of how far the genre has fallen. ⭐ Stars: 3 / 10. Technically competent gore is the only thing keeping it off the floor.

It does not want to scare you. It wants you to look away.

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Let's be blunt. Lee Cronin's The Mummy is not a horror movie so much as a dare: how much revolting imagery can it throw at you before you tap out. It takes one of cinema's oldest and most atmospheric monsters and buries it under a pile of viscera, and what crawls back out is a cringe fest that disgraces the name on the poster. Two hours of your life, gone, and the movie has almost nothing to show for the trade.

One director, one setting. This is Evil Dead Rise again, just wrapped in bandages. Cronin has now proven he owns exactly one mode: loud, gory, and unimaginative, mistaking a high tolerance for grossness for a point of view. Strip the sarcophagus off this thing and you are watching the same movie he already made, with none of the tension and all of the splatter.

Gross where it should be scary. This is the sickness in a lot of modern horror in miniature. Instead of building dread, the film reaches for the most disgusting thing it can find and shoves your face in it. Nails torn slowly off fingers. Skin peeled away in sheets. It is not frightening, it is stomach turning, and there is a difference. Real horror makes you afraid of what might happen next. This just makes you queasy, makes you cringe, then does it again, and again, as if repetition were the same thing as suspense. It plays like an advertisement for how far the genre has slid.

Nobody home. The story hangs on a mother and father, and both give performances so blank they border on catatonic. They drift through the film glassy and useless, ignoring danger signs so obvious that the audience is shouting at the screen while the parents shrug. The movie does close to zero work on who these people are, so when the horror finally comes for their family there is nothing underneath it. You cannot fear for characters you were never given a reason to care about.

A pervy spirit, not an ancient evil. For something sold as ancient and evil, the entity at the center behaves less like a timeless force and more like a sadomasochistic creep. The film keeps bombarding you with useless, leering, gross lines and visuals that seem more interested in degradation than in dread. Nothing about it reads as old, or vast, or frightening. It just feels nasty for the sake of nasty.

The overdone ending. Then, having already worn you down, the film overdoes the finale too, piling on more of the same disgusting excess with no build and no payoff. By the time the credits roll, the only feeling left is regret. Not fear, not awe, just the flat disappointment of an evening thrown away.

So why eight shakers? Because this is the rare movie that does not merely bore you, it leaves you a little angry that you sat through it. The one thing keeping it off the very bottom is that the effects team is clearly skilled. The gore is well made. It is just deployed in service of nothing.

The verdict: A failed horror movie and a disgrace to The Mummy name. All the disgust modern cinema can manufacture, none of the fear, and an ending that leaves you cold. Skip it, and wash the taste out with a real horror film.

So, is it scary? No. Is it a nightmare? Only in the sense that you will want the last two hours back.

Pass the salt. 🧂