THE MUMMY THEME PARK – I agree with John Waters ie “there are no bad films, only boring ones.” But I wonder if John Waters ever saw ‘The Mummy Theme Park’. It’s as if some people (or perhaps beings similar to humans but closer to replicants) heard at one point about things called ‘movies’ and decided to try to make one, based on vague and slightly mocking instructions handed to them by a sadist. Or I might say instead that no, it feels like the entire future collective consciousness of mankind has broken down, become malignant and beamed an image of itself back into our own ancient times, where it has been reconstituted by a crap computer effects package as a form of torture. But then I’d be getting carried away with myself. ‘The Mummy Theme Park’ is just one of those “what am I watching” experiences. We should be glad of them when they crop up, because that doesn’t happen too often; you could watch bagful after bagful of boring tripe scraped from the cheapest corners of CEX, and most of it would leave only the bare hint of an impression if it managed to form a memory trace at all. But you would not forget ‘The Mummy Theme Park’. Well, if I’m going to make a stand for this ‘experience’, I’d better tell you what it’s about. Someone has decided to open a ‘Jurassic Park’ style tourist attraction inside a Pharoah’s tomb that has risen from the depths after an earthquake, and they’ve roped in a photographer so they can show the world how great it all is in a brochure or something. The park, the mummy theme park, is overrun by cybernetically enhanced Egyptian mummies who throw basic undead moves but also demonstrate confusion when faced with human breasts. There’s lots of wandering around and the usual horror time filler stuff, but it’s like watching people do all that in a shit computer game. Everything in it, mummies, ‘actors’, beer-spitting pharaoh heads, floats around atop cheap budget greenscreen from 2004, decorated with woeful visuals that could only have been supplied by the malfunction of some low-end video graphics suite. I was appalled, excited and mildly bored in equal measure, and any film that can provoke that kind of response in me bears the sure mark of cinematic rotten-to-the-coreness. Respect. Director Alvero Passeri made ‘Plankton’, which I’ve seen but can’t recall. I’ll have to dig it out; if it’s even remotely as ripe as this, I’ll be onto a winner.
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