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Stay Home, Watch Horror: 5 Mummy Movies to Stream This Week

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Bubba Ho Tep

Of all the classic monsters, the mummy remains the most overlooked and forgotten. Compared to the brute strength of Frankenstein’s monster, the primal ferociousness of the werewolf, or even the commanding power of vampires, the mummy seems far less imposing. At least upon the creature’s first cinematic introduction, Universal’s 1932 feature The Mummy.

Wrapped in bandages and with the rigid, lumbering pace of a long-dead corpse, The Mummy’s eponymous monster and subsequent iterations represented a fragile foe easy to evade. Like many of its counterparts, the mummy tends to be a character steeped in tragedy. Its ancient leanings compound that. There’s a rich history to this movie monster that makes it fascinating despite a lack of scares. Of course, more modern versions play around with the concept of what a mummy could be, bringing the scares and even the laughs.

This week’s streaming picks spotlight one of the most underutilized cinematic monsters.

Here’s where you can watch them…


Waxwork – Prime Video, Tubi

Consider this fun monster mashup more of an introduction to the mummy, a dip your toes in the water sort. When a group of friends receives a private invitation to a new waxwork museum that’s just moved into the neighborhood, they discover that stepping beyond the exhibits’ ropes leads to worlds of horror. Anthony Hickox unveils the museum’s mysteries in an anthology-like format. One by one, the friends fall into deadly encounters with the foundational horror archetypes. That includes a trip to an Egyptian tomb, ending in a claustrophobic nightmare with a mummy. The mummy’s story here might be brief, but it serves as a potent reminder for the monster’s inclusion among the classics.


The Monster Squad – Prime Video

Like Waxwork, this gateway horror gem by Fred Dekker assembles the classic monsters and unleashes them upon a small town. It’s up to a young group of monster fanatics to stop them. The Mummy first spooks the youngest member of the Monster Squad but becomes the easiest to thwart among Dracula’s allies. Still, the movie treats the monster with reverence, and it’s always fun to see it appear in a setting far removed from ancient Egypt.


Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb – FlixFling

This slow-burn Hammer Horror presents an atypical mummy very loosely based on Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars. An archaeological expedition locates the unmarked tomb of an evil queen, Tera (Valerie Leon), and an obsessed professor brings her coffin back home to London. Soon after, the professor’s daughter begins to behave strangely; Queen Tera seeks to return by possessing the girl. While less bloody or intense than many of its Hammer counterparts, this feature boasts stunning production design and a brooding atmosphere. Considering just how troubled the production was, including the death of original director Seth Holt five weeks into the shoot, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb is a surprisingly solid, if underseen, effort.


The Mummy (1999)– HBO Max

Stephen Sommers reinvigorated the mummy with this well-loved adventure-horror movie that launched a franchise. A swashbuckling American and a clumsy Egyptologist unwittingly awaken a powerful mummy who begins to wreak havoc as he searches for the reincarnation of his long-lost love. Sommers pays homage to Universal’s original while creating a brand-new type of mummy, a powerful spirit that regenerates and wields the Plagues of Egypt to his whim. It’s an epic tale of love and revenge, spanning multiple action-packed set pieces that hold up quite well.


Bubba Ho-Tep – Prime Video

Don Coscarelli takes a creative approach in addressing the sluggish nature of standard ancient mummies; he unleashes it upon a pool of potential victims too feeble to outrun it. Bruce Campbell stars as an aged man claiming to be the still-living Elvis Presley. When a reanimated mummy in cowboy gear starts feeding off the residents in Presley’s nursing home, he teams up with John F. “Jack” Kennedy, who uses a wheelchair, to stop it. Coscarelli injects plenty of laughs, but for Shady Rest Retirement Home residents, this mummy represents a massive threat. The filmmaker uses a silly concept to weave a poignant and thrilling tale, breathing new life into the undead archetype.

Horror journalist, RT Top Critic, and Critics Choice Association member. Co-Host of the Bloody Disgusting Podcast. Has appeared on PBS series' Monstrum, served on the SXSW Midnighter shorts jury, and moderated horror panels for WonderCon and SeriesFest.

Editorials

‘The Company of Wolves’ at 40: One of the Most Underrated Werewolf Movies Ever Made

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There’s a compelling idea in anthropology that many ancient werewolf legends are derived from our species’ need to rationalize the more animalistic side of humanity – which is why lycanthropy has historically been used to explain everything from medieval serial killers to cannibalism. While I personally think there’s a lot more to unpack when it comes to tales of wolfmen and women, this is still a great example of why so many of our most enduring fairy tales involve big bad wolves.

And in the world of film, I think there’s only one feature that really nails the folkloric origins of werewolf stories, namely Neil Jordan’s 1984 fairy-tale horror classic, The Company of Wolves. Even four decades later, there’s no other genre flick that comes close to capturing the dreamlike ambience behind this strange anthology, and that’s why I’d like to take this opportunity to look back on one of the most underrated werewolf flicks ever made.

The Company of Wolves was originally a short story contained in the 1979 anthology The Bloody Chamber, a collection of deconstructed fairy-tales intended for mature readers penned by English author Angela Carter. With the book quickly becoming a hit as readers became fascinated with its subversion of classic folk stories and (then) controversial feminist undertones, it was soon transformed into a duology of BBC radio-dramas which adapted both The Company of Wolves and Carter’s reimagining of Puss-in-Boots.

These radio-dramas soon attracted the attention of then up-and-coming Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan, who decided to meet with Carter to discuss expanding on her stories and bringing them to life on the big screen. The duo soon realized that a single short story wasn’t enough material for a feature-length film, so they decided to adapt all of Carter’s werewolf tales into a single anthology.

With a completed script and a $2.3 million budget, Jordan decided to tackle the project like a hybrid between a theatrical period drama and a schlocky monster movie. Effects-heavy creature features were a hot commodity back in the ’80s, with films like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London proving that there was an audience for horrific lycanthrope transformations, so the director soon recruited a team that could turn this odd collection of feminist folk stories into something commercially viable.

Not exactly a great pick for family movie night.

Shooting would eventually take place almost entirely within the England-based Shepperton Studios, with notable production designer Anton Furst (who would later be known for his work on Tim Burton’s Batman films) helping to bring Jordan’s vision of a darkly romantic fairy-tale world to life. Appropriately enough, production would also involve a real pack of trained wolves (as well as a collection of dyed dogs), though extensive puppetry and animatronics were also used to flesh out the more gruesome parts of the flick.

After a grueling nine-week shoot where budgetary constraints led to corners being cut on props and costumes, The Company of Wolves was finally released in September of 1984 – just in time for spooky season. In the finished film, we follow the strange dreams of a sulky teenage girl named Rosaleen (first-time actress Sarah Patterson) as the film unravels an Arabian-Nights-inspired tapestry of both familiar and not-so-familiar stories about big bad wolves.

From sexually charged cautionary tales to parables about female empowerment, this surreal collection of deranged bedtime stories is much more than the creature feature that the marketing initially suggested. Like a more horror-oriented version of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, The Company of Wolves exudes that same kind of hormonal teenage energy that transports us back to a time when the world was both scary and exciting in equal measure.

That’s not to say that this is an entirely pleasant experience, however, and I’m not just talking about the film’s horror elements. A big portion of the flick’s overtly sexual moments involve the then 13-year-old Patterson coming to grips with her blossoming womanhood and the dangers of predatory men (usually marked with a humorous unibrow), something that naturally makes for some intentionally uncomfortable viewing – especially in the year of our lord 2024.

Obviously, I don’t think it’s my place to dissect (or even judge) the effectiveness of the film’s commentaries on being a young woman, but even as a man I can still appreciate the thought and care that went into crafting this Jungian cocktail of serious themes in a genre-movie package that almost certainly went on to inspire future werewolf movies like Ginger Snaps.

Not the worst wedding I’ve been to.

That being said, what really keeps me coming back to the film is the absurd amount of memorable imagery. From a wedding party being taken over by canines to lonely treks through snowy groves, this is exactly the gloomy world I imagined as a child when reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales – and the dreamy atmosphere is only enhanced by the movie’s overall theatricality.

This also extends to the effects, as it’s easy to forgive decapitated dummy heads and ripped rubber skin when everything is happening in a magical hyper-reality, with a great example of this is being the scene where Grandma’s head unexpectedly explodes like a porcelain doll when it’s knocked off by a wolfman. That’s not to say that the effects are bad, as several of these transformations are downright grisly and likely influenced future lycanthrope effects like those in Underworld and even Trick ‘r Treat (even if the wolf-dogs here often look more cute than scary).

Of course, these aren’t the only things that The Company of Wolves has going for it, as the main trio of Patterson, Micha Bergese and the late, great Angela Lansbury exceptionally bring these exaggerated caricatures to life and the orchestral score is an absolute delight. I also really get a kick out of that bizarre ending implying that the dangers of adult life have literally come crashing into Rosaleen’s bedroom.

The Company of Wolves may not be a perfect film, suffering from some wonky pacing and the classic anthology problem where some stories are clearly much more enjoyable than others, but I’d argue that the flick’s iconic visuals and powerful thematic throughline more than make up for any minor flaws. And while we’ve seen bigger and better werewolf films since then, when it comes to adult-oriented fairy-tales, this is one psycho-sexual journey that is still worth revisiting 40 years down the line.

The Company of Wolves

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