Normally, I almost never watch movies on TV, just on my phone.. but today I decided to watch on the decoder and I happened to sit with a horror movie, this one I was able to watch because we were plenty watching it, but i would not have been able to watch alone on my own, so this is a horror movie like I said, The Mummy from 1999 and let me just tell you how this whole story goes.
So this movie opens way back in ancient Egypt, there we meet Imhotep , he is this high priest serving the Pharaoh, a man with serious access and serious secrets, then turns out he is been having an affair with Anck su namun , who happens to be the Pharaohs own mistress, which already tells you that this story was never going to end well for anybody involved, when Pharaoh finds out about their affair, chaos automatically breaks loose and instead of facing execution for what she has done, Anck su namun takes her own life just right there.... You see now a normal person would like just mourn and then move on but Imhotep decides to attempt something thats forbidden, it is a dangerous ritual to bring her back from the dead and because ancient Egyptian priests apparently did not play when it came to punishment, Imhotep gets caught and sentenced to a fate worse than death itself.... he was mummified alive, cursed to never be reborn, sealed away in this place called Hamunaptra, known as the City of the Dead.
Now fast forward to several centuries later, to 1926, and that is where our actual main characters come in, Rick O'Connell, an adventurer with a knack for finding trouble, stumbles across the exact location of Hamunaptra
Meanwhile, Evelyn Carnahan who is a librarian and Egyptologist who is clearly more book smart than field smart at this point now convinces Rick to take her back there, she is hoping that this discovery could be the thing that finally makes her career go to the next level, but of course, because this is that kind of adventure movie, they are not the only ones after this treasure, a rival group of treasure hunters racing them to the exact same site, and there everybody wants to be the one who will gets there first.
Now here comes the mistake that sets off the entire horror side of this movie, Evelyn, in her excitement over this ancient find, ends up reading aloud from the "Book of the dea" and truthfully , if i had a naira for every time a character in a horror movie reads something they clearly should not be reading, i would be rich by now somehow, that one careless decision accidentally resurrects Imhotep, and from that moment, everything spirals into full chaos.
Imhotep wakes up in a very terrible state, he is decayed and weak, basically falling apart but see that does not stop him from doing what he needs to do to get his strength back, he starts by hunting down and draining the life force of the men who disturbed his resting place, slowly regenerating his body piece by piece with every victim and he is not doing all this just for revenge either, he is also searching for the reincarnation of his lost love, Anck su namun, while plotting something way bigger, unleashing the ten biblical plagues to gain power nobody could possibly stop...
Watching this unfold with a group of people honestly made the whole experience so much easier, because I will be the first to admit, this is not a movie i would have survived watching alone, every time Imhotep's face started decaying and reforming on screen, somebody in the room was screaming, and that collective fear somehow made it fun instead of terrifying... the chaos just kept escalating, the sandstorms, scarab beetles doing the absolute most, random mummified soldiers rising up... it was a whole lot happening at once, but in that classic adventure horror combo kind of way that somehow works...
When it gets to the climax now, you are just watching this full fledged battle between these ancient curses and modern day adventurers who are trying to thwart an unstoppable force from destroying everything and see ehn.... horror movie or not, but watching it in a full room rather than by myself, definitely made this one of the more entertaining evenings I've had in a long time.
Rating: 80/100