DAWN OF THE MUMMY [1981] [HCF REWIND]

Dawn of the Mummy (1981)
Directed by: Frank Agrama
Written by: Daria Price, Frank Agrama, Ronald Dobrin
Starring: Barry Sattels, Brenda Siemer Scheider, George Peck

HCF may be one of the newest voices on the web for all things Horror and Cult, and while our aim is to bring you our best opinion of all the new and strange that hits the market, we still cannot forget about our old loves, the films that made us want to create the website to spread the word.  So, now and again our official critics at the HCF headquarters have an urge to throw aside their new required copies of the week and dust down their old collection and bring them to the fore…. our aim, to make sure that you may have not missed the films that should be stood proud in your collection.

This week, as a kind of addition to the column by Matt Wavish which is making its way through all the films that were once on the Video Nasty list, Doc presents two films which got caught up in the Video Nasty furore and were often removed from shelves but were never actually classified as Video Nasties.  The first is actually a pretty poor movie, but we all enjoy a fun bad movie sometimes, and what horror fan can resist a mixture of mummies and zombies?

HCF REWIND NO.50. DAWN OF THE MUMMY [1981]

AVAILABLE ON DVD

DIRECTED BY: Frank Agrama

WRITTEN BY: Frank Agrama, Ronald Dobrin, Daria Price

STARRING: Brenda King, Barry Sattels, George Peck, John Salvo

RUNNING TIME: 96 mins

REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera, Official HCF Critic

Egypt, 3000 BC.  The cruel Sefirama is dead and is wrapped up and embalmed. The high priestess places a curse on any who violate his tomb, a curse that says Sefirama will rise from the dead, along with his six servants, and kill.  The tomb is shut up, entombing the servants who are then killed with poison gas.  The present day.  Professional grave robber Rick Cannon is blowing the tomb open with explosives, despite objections by Zena, a seemingly crazy local woman who cries about a curse.  Some other locals from the village nearby, who worked for Rick before and feel cut out of this project, enter the tomb before Rick is able to and have their faces melted by the poison gas, which evidently still works.   However, it is something else that really hinders Rick; a fashion shoot which thinks it is a good idea to shoot at an Egyptian tomb……

The title of Dawn Of The Mummy implies that this is a combination of The Mummy and Dawn Of The Dead, which at the time was inspiring  [if that is the right word] many imitations, mostly from Italy.   I suppose in some respects this is right.  However, it is also a hilariously inept production that can certainly be enjoyed if you have a weakness for bad movies, but will also leave many folk just shaking their head in disbelief with its ridiculous scripting, atrocious acting and amateurish filming.  But then what else would you expect from the guy responsible for Queen Kong?   Unfortunately, it has a few too many dull spots to be considered a true classic of crap filmmaking, and doesn’t really make the most of its premise.  There is also the occasional scene or aspect that works rather well and jars with the idiocy of everything else.  When you are enjoying a film for its badness, you don’t really want it to start getting good, though Dawn Of The Mummy never stays good long enough for more than a minute or two!

Dawn Of The Mummy was occasionally mentioned as a Video Nasty but, like City Of The Living Dead, was never actually on the official DPP list, it was just sometimes lumped in with those films.  It received a UK cinema release, one depressing feature of modern cinema distribution being that many movies that would have got a theatrical release back then, and indeed an audience, just wouldn’t do so now.  This version was cut by 27 seconds, mostly toning down the Romero-esque climax, but the video of the same version was pulled from shelves during the Video Nasty crisis and, when the movie was released ‘officially’ in 1987, nearly two extra minutes were removed, resulting in a film with virtually no gore at all except for the opening heart and liver removal.  I remember hiring out this version and being unable to work out why it was an ‘18’ certificate, nor why major Hollywood films of the time like Robocop were being allowed to be far more violent than cheapie low budget horror movies that far fewer people would be likely to see.  Unsurprisingly, the version of Dawn Of The Mummy put out on DVD had all the gore in, and quite plentiful it is too, though mainly in the final third.

The opening Egyptian scene looks ridiculously cheap but at least makes it clear that much of the film is actually being shot in Egypt, though if you’re a little bit ‘up’ on Egyptology you will spot things like the Pyramids of Giza missing the original outer layer they would have had at the time.   It’s not made clear whether Sefirama is a pharaoh or not – I would assume that he is, considering the details of the rite conducted – but it’s good to see some of the actual insides removal for a change, something that is rarely shown.  Cut to the present day, and we soon realise that the quality of acting in this movie can be easily divided into; poor acting and totally shit acting.  The poor acting, which mostly mixes vapidity with the occasional bit of hammy emoting, is nothing special, but the totally shit acting…..well, that is something else.  I’m especially talking of Barry Sattels as Rick, whose hysterical eye rolling and yelling is so bad it almost crosses the line and actually becomes…..good.  What is especially odd is that most of the cast speak their lines in English and in their own voices, but still often come across as being dubbed.  Strange.

As with some of the Hammer movies it is around half way before the Mummy actually rises and so we have to sit through much padding such as Rick bedding one of the stupid models and the odd supposedly spooky moment, such as the finding of some severed heads and the spilling of a canopic jar, its still-moist [!] contents burning a hand, though no real suspense is built. When the Mummy is eventually awoken by bright lights [!] which makes him leak fluids[!], any sense goes out the window.  The Mummy seems to awaken and a couple of scenes later we see someone dragged under a door, presumably by the Mummy, yet in the next scene he’s back half-dead in the tomb again and needs more bright lights to revive him again!  The slow moving, shuffling Mummy is later spotted in the local village, which seems to need a jeep drive to reach in good time, the same night he kills someone in the tomb [maybe he can teleport].  Eventually the zombies rise from the sand, but they are not the six entombed servants but random minions who, once risen, seem to do nothing until about 20 minutes later.  It actually seems like many of the scenes have been assembled in the wrong order.

Still, the actual Mummy, which looks modelled on Christopher Lee’s, looks really menacing, being extremely tall and uncannily skinny.  Some of the early scenes in which he features do actually contain some fear.  As for the zombies, they’re quite eerie when rising out of the sand and photographed in half-darkness, but the makeup is shown to be rather weak later on and some of the extras wave their arms and just look silly.  The occasional bit of grue, including an especially crappy-looking cleaver in a head, will just about keep gore fans happy until the climatic village bloodbath, with loads of gut chomping, an eye-removal etc., though you may well have seen it all before, such as a bit of a dead woman being chewed upon by a group of zombies which is shot exactly like a simialr scene in Zombie. The effects are reasonable if below the best standards of the time, though the whole sequence is pretty badly directed overall.  For the most part, Agrama show himself up as a director of great incompetence, with staging that is often truly bad, but there is the odd scene that shows some talent.  The emergence of the zombies is extremely atmospheric and some scenes involving them at an oasis make good use of semi-darkness and are even quite scary.

Don’t let me fool you though, the movie is crap most of the time!  The characters all behave like retards [even if you’ve always thought models were idiots, these ones take the biscuit] and can’t even agree how to pronounce Sefirama’s name.  The pacing is all over the place and never seems to gather any momentum, though the film is never boring and that’s certainly a good thing!   The score by Shuki Levy alternates between irritating synthesiser warbling and actually rather catchy, semi-disco stuff with a main theme that may just stay in your head for days afterwards.  The thing about Dawn Of The Mummy is that you’ll probably laugh at it and pick it apart while you are watching it, but I somehow doubt you’ll regret watching it.  I’ve watched it several times, and never regretted it once.

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