FILM CLIPS:

Johnny Moronic made some caps and a (zipped .avi) film clip of Essence Atkins in XCU: Extreme Close-Up. (She's Dee Dee on Half & Half)

This week's STV releases: Seven Mummies (2006)

Six escaped convicts and their female hostage are trying to reach the Mexican border through the desert. They take a detour from their flight when they run into an Apache shaman who is filled with knowledge that is possessed only by those still close enough to the land to act with the strength of the panther, the courage of the eagle, and the cunning of the ... um .. salamander. Whatever. This is the function provided by all old Indian holy men here in the Southwest. Whenever we white folks need any important mystical information, we round up an ancient Native American, and they point us in the right direction. Just last week I stopped an old man outside an Indian casino and he told me in words both wondrous and wise of the true secret to happiness - that being to double down on eleven when the dealer has a five showing.

In the case of this movie, the holy man spins a tale of lost Spanish wealth, of a city so rich that the people consider gold to be suitable only for toilet paper, because the streets are paved with rubies, the children play with platinum marbles, and the rabbits shit out malted milk balls. It seems that the Spanish Conquistadors enslaved 10,000 indigenous people and used 2,500 burros to strip the Guachapa Mountains of all its precious metals, hiding it all the booty in the desert until they could arrange to transport it back to Spain. Seven Jesuit priests vowed to protect the treasure until the Spanish returned, but nobody ever came back for the loot and as the priests aged and died, they were mummified and buried with the treasure to protect it for all eternity. There is no explanation for how the last priest to die managed to mummify himself, or how we could possibly have this info. Perhaps the Jesuit mummies had some secretaries who recorded it all, and also worked the mummification process on the last priest.

At any rate, nobody came to the burial place for hundreds of years until some Western settlers and prospectors built a town atop the buried treasure in the 19th century. When the townspeople discovered the riches, they awoke the seven mummified Jesuit priests from their sleep, and the mummies attacked the humans, turning them all into zombies or vampires (it says vampires in the credits, so let's go with that) by using some mysterious power now lost to time but once known by the legendary elite cadre of vampire-creating Jesuit mummy kung-fu priests. Throughout the subsequent years, the town has continued to exist at night, albeit frozen in time, but it and all of its bloodsucking denizens disappear during the day, kind of like Brigadoon, and the area appears to be open desert.

Of course, the convicts can't pass up the fabled Ciudad de Bolas Malteadas de la Leche, so they decide to postpone their run for the border in order to take on all the vampires and kung-fu Jesuit mummies for the chance at all the candy. And all the marbles.

The film goes for a vibe similar to From Dusk Till Dawn, except that it is the "straight to bargain bin" version. You can draw your own conclusions about the merit of the plot. It is supported by dreadful execution:

• The film is consistently underlit. I wasn't even sure whether there was any nudity until I captured and photoshopped the images.

• The action scenes are mishandled. People fall out of camera, and punches obviously miss.

• The background score is not properly balanced with the dialogue. Of course, considering the dialogue, that wouldn't be so bad except that the music is usually some irritatingly inappropriate hip-hop. Or maybe hip-hop is the right music to accompany kung-fu Jesuit mummies in Old West towns. I'm not really sure there is a better choice, to tell you the truth.

• Frankly, the acting and special effects aren't so hot either.

The only good news: the film is only about 70 minutes long, excluding the opening and closing credits.

Seven Mummies is currently rated 1.7 at IMDb. The worst film of all time is rated 1.8, so this baby could be a contender when it amasses enough votes.

Ananda St. James

 

 

 

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Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.