The Flop House - Lee Cronin's The Mummy

Episode Date: August 8, 2026

Shocktober threatens to break the bounds of the fall, with this unexpected incursion into August. This aggression will not stand! Watch yourself, Shocktober! Anyway, on this episode we discuss The Mummy. The one with Brendan Fraser? No. The one with Tom Cruise? No. The one with Boris Karloff? No, silly, LEE CRONIN'S THE MUMMY. He wrote his name on it with Sharpie before putting it in the fridge! Tickets for FLOP TV SEASON FOUR are now live! Go pick up a pass for individual episodes or the whole dang season! And if you live in the Louisville area and want to see us live NOT through your computer screen, come to our show at Whirling Tiger in September! Stay updated on all things Flop House, plus a little extra, with our NEWSLETTER, “Flop Secrets! Paste https://feeds.simplecast.com/EOAFriME into iTunes (or your favorite podcatching software) to have new episodes of The Flop House delivered to you directly, as they’re released. Wikipedia page for Lee Cronin's The Mummy Recommended in this episode: Dan: Stalker (1979), A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969) Stu: Kill (2023) Elliott: The Secret Agent (2025) Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinflop

On this episode, we discuss Lee Cronin's The Mummy. The movie that dares to ask the question, what if Lee Cronin made a mummy movie? Hey, everyone, and welcome to the flop house. I'm Dan McCoy. Hey, thanks for welcoming me to the flop house, Dan. I'm Stuart Wellington. Well, so was the welcome just meant for Stewart? Yeah, you got to. Oh, okay. You want one, you got to pay.

So I'm an interlover. Okay. He's only allowed one invite per. Only one invite. I guess I'm Ellie Kael in the stowaway to this one because Dan couldn't be bothered to get a plus two for the podcast. Elliot latched onto my tummy like a lamprey or whatever. Yeah, exactly. I stuffed myself in your navel like a little, like a little aquato.

He's cleaning you of, you know, excess skin, parasites. Yeah. Yep, exactly. Yeah. So, guys. Kind of like an eye. oxpecker and I'm a giraffe. A lamprey doesn't do that, Dan.

A lamprey, I think, is a blood-sucking. Oh, I don't know. You're thinking I'm more like a remora, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was just... I think an oxpecker's cooler because, like, I feel like we could be... If we were in, like, a third-generation Lion King offshoot, I would be this giraffe character. You would be the oxpecker that's, like, eating all the tux and mites off. Opspecker sounds like an insult, though.

I'm trying so hard not to make a joke off of the oxuspecker, so, yeah. Yeah. But I think that's right, Stuart. To know why you guys had to be gross. We're talking like making a Disney movie here. This is fucking weird. But this is in Lion King 4. They do it now.

And they're trying to go for an adult audience. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was rule 34 somehow funded a movie. And they're like, well, Stuart's voice sounds different enough from Seth Rogan. Yeah, exactly. He can be the big kind of rhino or giraffe character. Again, giraffe character. Yeah, yeah.

Dan, what character are you in this Rule 34 Lion King ripoff, I guess, or official sequel? Is there like a... Is there an animal that just sort of watches from a distance? Most animals. Most animals watch them here, but they've already got one, so, you know. Maybe you're a bird of some kind, too. Maybe you're a tape culture. Maybe I am a bird of some kind.

I'm like a bird. Yeah, I don't know where you is. I don't know how it is. I fly away. This is a podcast, mostly as you can hear, it's a podcast. It's a podcast where gibberish is spouted in the sort of a stream of consciousness monologue between three like-minded idiots.

But also it's a podcast where we watch a movie that was critically or commercially shunned and then we talked about it. Stuart didn't like my characterization. He frowned when I was too down on us as a podcast. Yeah, we're cool. We're cool dudes. Yeah.

In this case, we'll be talking about, Lee Cronin's the mummy. That's right. Shocktober cannot contain the bounds of the mummy. Also, they make a lot of horror movies these days. Yeah, I really do. There's a bounty of them, which is not a bad thing. And I just want to say off the bat, I just want to say off the bat,

this movie, I think I will be unfair to it. I think all of America was because if you, if someone comes to you and says, hey, we want to put your name in the title of the movie, how do you say no to that? On the other hand, I think it was much easier to make fun of this movie because it's the official title is Lee Cronin's the mummy. And the case can be made that Lee Cronin is not a well-known enough

piece of property to put his name in front of a much better known piece of property, The Mummy, and expect those two things to balance out. Let's make a couple things clear. Number one, it was not Lee Cronin's fault. From all reporting, he was not particularly interested in this idea, but they

wanted to do it to differentiate it from the existing Brendan Fraser mummy. This was like a Blumhouse dictate that he then got on board. different? They feel pretty similar. One's a kind of semi all ages adventure and the other one is a... Very bisexual.

Very bisexual friends, but... Yeah, the other one is a movie in which children are tortured over and over again, yeah. Oh, right. Which does... is actually the fact that it says Lee Cronin's does clue you in that there's going to be child torture in it.

I guess so, yeah, compared to the previous movie, yeah. But the other side of it is, yes, it is objectively hilarious as a title. When I first saw the title, I was like, is Lee Cronin like a Dean Coontz figure that I just am not familiar with?

That he like wrote a bunch of books that now finally one of them is coming to, I'm like, oh no, he made the hole in the ground. Yeah. And the second Evil Dead Rise. Rise, yeah. The second new one is always the one that has to have rise in the title.

If that Rise is fine. I feel like the new Evil Dead movies, I haven't seen the newest one because I don't think it's out yet. But the evil... It's out. We saw it. Oh, is it? I haven't seen the new one. The newer Evil Dead movies lose what to me is the most important aspect of the Evil Dead movies,

which is charm and fun. Yeah, yeah. And they're just... I mean, there's... I mean, those movies exist. There's no reason to remake them, really, you know? Not to go on too much of a tangent here, but I was talking to the podcast, Steve Kitsanski. And he pointed out kind of what I think is probably the key ingredient that's missing is there's no ash character.

Like no character who's kind of a idiot No character in that mode, in that role. Yes. There's no character who's like kind of an idiot who like you don't mind seeing get beat up a little, but you also want to root for. Yes.

And I think that is one of the things that differentiates that series because this direction they've taken them in is just try to get extreme gross out you know, what things can we do at a human body. Still funny. Yes, I do think, well that's what I was going to say.

I think that's funnier than the critics are giving these. reason one's credit for. I don't think the first one was that funny, but I think Rise and Byrne. Not until like the very end when it goes super crazy. I mean, Byrne, I haven't seen it. Rise has some funny parts in it,

but there's also like a, I mean, part of it also that like the Evil Dead stuff has just become kind of kind of like a generic type problem, you know, as opposed to it was so distinct in the old movies, partly because it was goofy as I'll get out, but, you know. Well, it's important that we're talking about evil dead now because we're about a movie that feels a lot like an evil dead. Evil Dead movie. It feels kind of like 40% hereditary plus 30% the exorcist.

I would say 85% the exorcist. I would say it is a very high percentage the exorcist. I'm being generous, Elliot. I guess so. Any movie that starts in a Middle Eastern country and that involves a little girl saying swears and being mean to her family because she's possessed by something is the exorcist. Like that's the same movie. So real quick, before we get into this one, guys, because

as you've guessed, I'm on sumummery duty, or wait, some mummy duty? Which one? Which one works better? They wouldn't normally mummify the duty. That's not part of Egyptian burial practices, yeah. Only if they wanted to take it into the next world with them, which is probably not. If it was a piece they were particularly proud of, yeah. Look at the size of that thing. Can you believe I passed that?

Wrap that up. Put it in a jar. I'm sure the God of death this. I want to show a nubis this thing. He's going to be like, whoa. Yeah, yeah. It looks like a field hockey stick. Let's check it out.

Isis, get over here. Cyrus, get over here. Look at this thing. Check this out. It looks like a copash. So what I was asking is, do you guys have any personal history with mummies? Or The Mummy?

I mean, just for you... I haven't angered one, if that's what you're asking. I haven't gotten... I haven't been involved with a mummy that has been reanimated. I have to admit, the mummy has always been my least favorite of the Universal Monster or classics, if only because it's hard to do stuff with him when he's in mummy form.

But that first mummy movie, the 30s one was really good. Those Bernard Fraser movie movies are pretty fun. But recently, at the California Science Center, I think it may still be up. There's an exhibit of real-life mummies, bodies that have been either mummified or were naturally mummified by the places

that they were buried or left in. And I took my son to see that, and I've got to say, we looked at a lot of dead bodies. And a lot of, they're real dead bodies, real mummies and it was kind of spooky. You can't help and imagine those bodies getting up and talking to you, maybe offering you a meal, which you should not accept.

Doing a dance, yeah. I'm so distant at this point from like... Humanity. Yes. Honestly, kind of. But also... What was that Japanese novel? Like not quite human or not even human or something?

Like the horror concept of a mummy has been so abstracted for me that I had to think about it now. And I'm just like, you know, there is something cool about it, Mommy. You know, essentially it is like just a flavor of zombie, but it's one that has been like specifically like they've put it, they've preserved it. They've put it in like a container for thousands of years and then you're like open it up. And there's good stuff in that. It's just it is a harder one, as you say, to do a lot of different things.

Well, I think you're putting your finger on what makes a mummy special, which is that it is an ancient thing that is still alive. It should be dead, but it's still alive, and it is old. And what this mummy movie fails to do, what this mummy does is just, it's just possesses human bodies by a demon. It's like not actually, there's not very much mummy in this mummy movie. It's not really a mummy movie. But it's the idea, every universal monster has an element of something that is unnatural,

something that seems so against the laws of nature, but also something that is sensitive and vulnerable or sympathetic in some way, or at least understandable in some way. And the mummy, it's the combination of this is a, an ancient dead thing that is somehow still alive, but also that it has a reason, it has a desire that keeps it alive in a way, it's similar to Dracula in that way.

It's an undead thing that has a desire for a living thing, in the original mummy movie at least. And that's the key of it, and it feels like in this one they don't. And the Brennan Fraser ones. And the Brandon Fraser ones to be sure. Yeah, that's true, that's true. MOTEP's got, you know,

stuff to do you do. Emotep B horny. MOTEP has an M.O. And it'd be in horny. So many. So many of the monsters are horny when it comes down to it. It really comes, yeah, it really says something, I guess. About the human condition, you know.

So obviously I have been selected to do the summamory because my connections to ancient Egyptality, ancient Egyptology, because, of course, I own all 10 albums by the Egypt-themed death metal band, Nile, one of the greatest death metal bands of all time. So I will make sure that I, you know, luckily that has helped me understand the whole... How far are you along and get it? the cover of the Iron Maiden Power Slave album tattooed on your back. I know it was a multi-stage process. What have you got so far?

That was a problem. I have a bunch of cover-ups back there that I have to do because I have like a yin-yang and I have a tramp stamp of the Bat Out of Hell cover. I got a cover up. After meatloaf let me down. It's not really a stamp at that point. I figure you need a good size for that to be legend.

No, no. That was part of the problem was it was too small. Yeah. Okay. It's like a postage stamp. I mean, I credit to the artist. It's still, you know, it's very legible. You went to one of the great tattoo miniaturists to get it done.

You can tattoo some rice. So we were trying to decide if for that Power Slave album cover, if we should just have somebody holding up a letter that has a postage stamp of the Milo bat out of hell. But they're also like, does this make sense? Somebody worships at a giant pyramid with Eddie on it. Would he be sending mail with a modern? I mean, the problem is that...

And that's a forever stamp, right? I'm like, no, it's not forever. No, it's not. You need those extra little stamps that Marge's husband paints in Fargo. I think part of the issue is that it would appear that someone was handing the letter to Eddie to mail. And that seems like that's not respectful of his position as a pharaoh. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. He's not going to go to the post office. No, of course not. He's too busy being a power slave, bemoaning that he has to die and can't live forever, yeah. Thank you. Yep. Okay, so our movie begins.

That movie, Lee Cronin's the mummy. It begins in... Wait, can I say the dumbest joke? The dumbest Iron Maid joke, instead of saying return to the center, it says back to the village. Anyway, continue.

I love it. That's just for me. It certainly wasn't for me. No. We got to listen to Power Slave. It's a great album. It's a great album. It's arguably Iron Maiden's best album.

Maybe not my favorite, but they're best. It's hard to you, yeah. So we, Our story begins in Oswan. I think I'm pronouncing that. Oswan, Oswan, Egypt. A family returns home to find that their pet bird is dead under mysterious circumstances.

This family loves to sing along to the radio except for the mom who is a real buzzkill and killjoy. Real buzzkill, a lot of cool tattoos looks like a wizard. She stops the singing and I was like, I was kind of enjoying that song. I don't know how much I'm going to enjoy in this movie, so I was not on her side. No, I mean, she is, she's coded as an evil witch pretty early.

Yeah. And that was the game I was playing throughout the movie, which is, how racist is this? It's a good question, Mark. But let's go through the movie and then we'll discuss. We three white men will decide for ourselves. Thank you. How offensive this is for Egyptians, yeah. So they find this dead pet bird and they're like, oh-oh, it started again.

So mom and dad go down into the basement, which leads to a buried giant black pyramid. they go inside the pyramid to find a black basalt sarcophagus using a series of pullies and winches. They lift up the lid of the sarcophagus to find a mummified human figure. And they're like, that's probably fine. That thing's moving. Uh-oh. And it uses its magic telekinesis powers to make a hook, spear the dad through the throat, and blood goes everywhere. Which I will honestly say, I'm like, this is wackier and grosser than I expected initially.

So, I agree. I will say, though, that it is funny to me that they see their bird has died, their pet bird, and they're like,

uh-oh, the mummy must be reviving. And I'm like, I don't know, pet birds. They die pretty frequently, I feel like. I mean,

yeah, I mean, I've been around more birds than mummies, so I don't, my sample size is a little different than these people.

So, but this is another example, there's, I feel like there's many examples in this movie of something absolutely crazy happening and then just like

cutting to a completely different scene. There is a moment later on where there is a bonkers scene that happens in front of a number of other people. And then they just cut to that night and I'm like, no, no, no, no, hold on a second. People are not leaving and going, well, that was weird and letting the family go about its business.

No. You're like, oh, I'm glad that party wrapped up early. Okay, so now we cut to Cairo, and we don't know when this first scene takes place, but we cut to Cairo. it's 2018. We meet a family living in... There's still time.

Yeah, we find a family living in Egypt. The father is Charlie. He's a reporter, like an American reporter who is stationed in Cairo. His wife is Larissa, who is a nurse, and their children are Katie, and their youngest is Sebastian. And Larissa is pregnant. So Charlie is played by the actor Jack Rayner. Classic Bad Bear Boy. And he must have been paid by the wide-eyed surprise look.

Like if you did a drinking game for this movie, which was how many times does Charlie with wide eyes look in shock at something, you would die because you would have alcohol poisoning. I've started finding it so funny that he had this react. Everything that happened, he had this wide-eyed, like, oh, reaction. They should have got him for the War of the World's movie. Yeah. But he was, you know, he was a great dufus in midsummer.

I liked him in the peripheral, the William Gibson series. That was pretty fun. I mean, I just have a chip on my shoulder because he was the star of the TV show Strange Angel, which was an adaptation of a story. Or Strangell, which was an adaptation of a story I wanted to adapt, a true life story.

And I wrote a spec pilot for it. And then that show came out and I'm like, well, I guess that's not going to happen. That's a bummer. So, Charlie gets some news that he is, he's been offered a job to move to New York. New York City and I think we can all agree.

Greatest city in the world, baby. Those dreams are cut short because they're child Katie. You love it by a state of mine. And that cut it. We can't afford that. We can't afford that. So these dreams are cut short. These dreams are cut short.

By when their young, when their child Katie is kidnapped out of their garden by the same tattooed wizard lady who hates music but loves giving chocolates to kids and is the mother of a girl named Layla we'll find out Layla

You mom may be your mummy Layla So she So she I'm glad that Yeah I'm glad that I'm glad that record her Like semi-muted Elliot

when he had a certain decimal level Okay So she uses a combination of candy promises and then a magic nectarine. She gives candy. Dan and I have to interrupt with songs as many times as possible in this one. I'm glad you did it because I definitely had the impulse to do the exact same song.

So this lady gives her a nectarine, a bug pops out, climbs down her throat, seems to send her into some kind of convulsions. That's how people get me, by the way, too, candy and promises. So Charlie chases after his daughter who has been kidnapped of. Of course, he is stopped by a mysterious sandstorm that shows up out of nowhere. They go to the police. There's no leads. The police think that maybe the parents get it.

Not even the Glenn Gary leads, because they are not closers. They don't get those. No, you don't get those. What the fuck? Yeah. Yeah, if they had closed a bunch of other cold cases of child abductions. First prize is a Cadillac. Second prize says steak knives.

Third knives. The third prize, you'll find this little girl. So they... ABM always. be mummeying. The detective assigned to their case is Detective Zaki or Zaki. And she, you know, has dealt with a lot of kidnappings and missing children and rarely does it end well.

Fast forward eight years later. Mm-hmm. And this is very funny, which is that it shows, it shows like a local news story and then it turns it to be nothing. And you're at Albuquerino's news and you see the dad is working there. And then it just goes eight years later in huge letters on the side of the screen. They've taken a left turn to Albuquerque in this game. They're not interested in going to the carrot festival.

No. Why would they? They're not rabbits. Be a strange thing for a family to do. To be like a carrot salesman that has to deal with fucking bugs bunny, like that guy would be just like fucking bother you. but only after you've done something to him. I mean, if you're following the Chuck Jones rules.

He's not going to pay the listed price for these things. He's going to trick me. He's going to try to trick you. Yeah, I am not going to give you a discount. You are going to give me a discount. I'm not going to give you a discount. You are going to give me a discount. You're not going to give me a discount.

And you're going to take this discount. You know what? Take the carriage for free. And then it always takes a moment before they recognize it. We just watched, I just showed my younger son, Roger Rabbit for the first time. And he enjoyed it a lot. And there was that part where he doesn't want to drink and he, He pulls that trick on him.

That movie? I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what. The period appropriate misogyny does not come off as well. But still an amazing looking movie. That movie looks amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're specifically just talking about Bob Hoskins' body, aati, right?

We are indeed. You get a shirtless scene with him. That's whatever he wants. Yeah, what a hunk. Which is they call him Bod Hoskins. What a performance that he fucking pioneered this like, I'm working with tennis balls acting. Yeah.

I mean, apparently it was really, apparently really threw him for a loop, and it took him a while to get back to do another movie because he was like, I'm still seeing these characters all around me. He had to, like, put himself in a place where he really saw them there.

And that's why he started murdering people. Oh, yeah, yeah. But then he hit himself in the head with a big wooden mallet and he stopped seeing the characters. Yeah, yeah, but he lost his memory, unfortunately. And he thought he was Italian racing star, Babiolosciones.

That explains those four years in his career. And all the scarves, he was wearing. So eight years later, Charlie Larissa, Seb, and their new younger daughter, Maude,

live in Albuquerque with Larissa's mother. In what appears to be a castle. Yes. Their house is enormous. This enormous castle house in Albuquerque. I mean,

the dollar stretches a little farther. It does. I mean, if you're a producer at a local news show, you are making the big bucks. Well, Larissa is also a nurse,

right? That's true. That's known for a high. I return. I mean, it depends on where you're doing it, you know. She could be the private nurse for an eccentric trillionaire. We don't know what's possible. She could be the private nurse of Joaquin Fis's character at the end of...

Concierge nurse, and perhaps. Yeah, yeah. And they live with Laris's mother, Carmen, who is a older religious woman. Yes. That will be important in a little bit. Okay. Back in Aswan, Egypt, there's a plane crash, a little... Looney twins back in Aswan.

Yeah, a little... Twin Prop plane crashes in the middle of, I guess, like a woods or something. Somewhere. It just crashes somewhere. We do find some pretty cool dead bodies that popped out of this. I mean, like, there's a little bit of love. Look at those awesome dead bodies. I mean, there's an effort to be like, well, if somebody's dying in this movie, it's going to be gross and crazy.

Nobody dies in a calm way in this movie. Yes. Yeah. Which I have to give it credit. Like, that's a. I don't think, I don't think, I'm not to spoil things, I don't think this movie works, but there's clearly some things about it

that I think are good. It definitely is not afraid to be gross. It's not afraid to be gross, and it's not afraid to do a lot of like split diopter shots and other like kind of wacky filmmaking stuff. I was worried their diopter was broken and it was only split. There's only split. Yeah.

You're like, oh, we borrow, who'd we borrow this one from? Brian DePaulma. Okay. there's a plane crash, of course, in that plane was a giant basalt black sarcophagus. Do we ever learn why they were transporting it? Yes.

Okay. We will later find out that they were, that these are the brothers of Lela, the sons of the magician lady. And they were trying to transport that because the valley was going to be flooded. That's right. So, and I don't, I guess,

being flooded as bad for, yeah. I mean, I, I don't know. It's one of those things where like, certainly when the Aswan Dam was built many, many years ago, like it flooded a lot of low-lying areas and people had to move. And that's one of the reasons that there's a temple,

a full Egyptian temple, a minor one, but a full one in the Metropolitan Museum, is that it was given as a gift in exchange, because of the work that the Met helped fund for them moving things to make way for the water that was coming through the dam. But that was also, but that was 50 years ago. So I don't know, I don't know what they're talking about,

talking about in terms of maybe they're building a new dam. Maybe it's just a reference or something. In the movie, yeah. Okay, so when the authorities... I will say, though, it's also a kind of not totally clear when this movie is taking place in some ways. Yeah. Because they...

Do people use cell phones in it? Eight years later. But like they're saying... It says 2018 and that 2026 in the description, but like everything looks vaguely 70s-ish in the movie. Like the way people dress, the colors of their interior decorating. But I don't think it's something. supposed to be set then. I think it's supposed to be set now.

There's definitely a reference to Taylor Swift. Yes, that's right. There's reference Taylor Swift. That's right. And the Egyptian police have computers. So maybe it's set now, but it feels like it's, it feels like it's set in the now. And VCRs. That's right. They have a VHS technology. Yeah. Okay, so the authorities open to sarcophics. Let's remove that. A stenographer, can we remove that from the record? My question about when the movie takes place? Thank you. I forgot for the references to Taylor Swift,

which are, which firmly plant it in the here and now. Yeah. Yeah. So they open up the sarcophagus and they find a mummified person, which turns out to be, that's right. 18, what, like 18-year-old Katie, who is, by all accounts, perfectly healthy, but seems to be in a semi-catotonic state. She has claws for hands. She has claws for hands. Her appearance looks either the results of makeup effects or digital effects. or a combination of the two.

She looks a lot like Snoke from the attack of the clones. That is a good call. She's got a very snokish look. Less Jedi. She looks and I mean eventually acts

like it is a build but it's not that much of a build. She looks and acts so much like a monster girl that it is very funny the length of time I mean I realize that this is her family but it's very funny

at the length of time everyone seems to be in denial about her. And they're like, yeah, yeah, she's okay. We can fix her. I think they recognize from the beginning that she has been physically and mentally disturbed

by what's happened. But I think they see her as like, oh, we're going to have to take care of her the rest of her life and we're trying to put a good face on it. Her mother's a nurse. And her mother's a nurse. So she's like, oh, this is a case

of mummy monsterification. I've dealt with this before. But I will say it does take them a long time to recognize that something supernaturally evil is going on. When there's a part, we'll get to it later

where the mother is clipping her nails and accidentally pulls off a huge long strip of flesh from her sit-daughters like and she's just trying to like kind of glue it back on or whatever. Like it's like, what are you doing? This is not supposed to happen. Almost like an exorcist spider walk at one point. I'm like, that's not normal behavior.

No matter how traumatized you've been. Come on. Okay, so they, the parents are notified. They do a little yippie. They jump on a plane and fly back to Cairo. People fly between Cairo and New Mexico. So, casually in this movie.

That is a long-ass flight. That would be a long flight. Yeah, yeah. No, this is back when the Concord was running, and it was running exclusively from Cairo. It was the Calvo, Albuquerque direct route, yeah. The two hubs. Yeah.

So they notify the parents. They go over there. They find Katie. Obviously, they are perturbed, but they're also happy to have their daughter. They're so glad to have her back, yeah. And the authorities are like, yeah, it might just take a little while. Best thing to do is take her home. But the doctors are like, she's perfectly healthy.

And I'm like, I don't, like, later on we'll find out that she is not. That her skin is in fact like weird parchment. But okay, dude. They didn't do a very thorough examination. They probably had the heave-jeevies. Like, can we get her out of here? Yeah, she's cool. You examine her.

I don't want to examine her. You examine her. I don't want to do it. We'll just tell the parents we examined her. Yeah. The fact that they don't find that parchment is literally. Little bazonkers. Okay.

So they take Katie home. The rest of the family is a little, a little weirded out by her. They put her on the second floor, which is odd since she does need a wheelchair. I feel like they should have moved her prepared a ground floor bedroom, yeah. But it means that her floor can then bubble over with some kind of acidic bile scum. Yeah, yeah.

Mummy vomit. So Katie is basically catatonic. There's a moment where her, her grandmother is praying over her and she like head butts her, which is, hey, you know that happens. Which receives no comment from the family?

Nope. Like a bunch of those things happen and it never seen, no one seems to care or notice. That mom's been on thin ice for a while. That's true. Somebody took her down a bag. Yeah. Yeah, finally.

Okay. She thinks she's so great with her faith. But like, you know, she, uh, her body moves a little bit, let's say a little bit weird.

Um, she performs, uh, Initially small acts of self-harm. She manages to sneak into the walls and crawl around on the inside of the walls and gobble up a scorpion she finds. Really questions whether she needs that wheelchair.

Since she seems to be moving around better than a normal person would be. A non-mummy person would be in those hallways, yeah. Guys, I want to ask for you whether it's the same. Like, one of my top things that Bob, like, I, you know, I'm pretty desensitized at this point as a lifelong horror movie fan and watcher. But toenail stuff is a real problem.

Okay. Now we're there. Finally, we'll get to it, the toenail stuff. I thought you were going to say, children in harm, in which case I would say, yeah, I find that I, that is a little bit worse for me. I don't have children.

The toenails don't bother me that much. There was a certain point, there was a certain point in the movie where I was like, this is not making me upset because it is a movie about this. It's making me upset because young actors had to do these things on camera

and I don't like that, you know. That was something that was starting to upset me a little bit. But that's because I'm a parent, I care about children. You guys, again, as childless adults, you think kids are somewhere between animals and refuse, so you don't really mean on it. It's weird. I'm the, I'm the opposite direction, actually.

I mean, not that, I mean, maybe I'm too trusting. Like, certainly being a child actor, like, has fucked up a number of people. So maybe that is what I should be worried about. But I assume it's not the same, but like, this is clearly the exorcist. And like the exorcist fucked up Linda Blair. Yeah. In a big, I mean, everyone who worked on that movie, it messed with them, but her especially. And so I'm like, so watching this, I'm like, ah, I don't know.

Yeah. Just having a little girl just repeating swears over and over again. Yeah. I like to believe we've learned something from all previous fuckups, but maybe not. Maybe I'm too optimistic in that way. I'm not knowing anything about the making of this. I'm not going to accuse Lee Kronin of doing what... Yeah, being a Friedkin, yeah.

Freedkin is bad to people, like it was bad to people. They didn't call him wildly Kronin. No. But I was sort of perturbed by like, why did you have to take a movie about a mummy and make it about this little girl be tortured? Yes, yes. Well, I think that was part of it.

Don't worry, there's a bunch of kids getting tortured in this. That's true, that's true. It just, it feels, but it also feels like a weird way to take a... What it really feels like to me is they took a pre-existing story and then attached a mummy element to it or they just were like,

well, what can we do with a mummy? I don't know, let's just like make one of the kinds of movies we normally make and we'll just, again, we'll just attach a mummy element to it. They're not really digging into an unearthing what's special about the mummy. They're not really unwrapping the mummy

to reveal what's unique about it. Yeah, people heard us talking about the toenails, so let's get to that. That's where the mother is attempting attempting to trim these crazy toenails. This whole section, I was like, okay, this is pretty creepy and gross and like a little funny. And then, so she's trying desperately like clip this toenail. And the whole time, like the grandmother's just like telling some kind of random story.

And of course, in the process of clipping off this massive toenail on her big toe, it just pulls off a long strip of skin up her shin. Later on. You're not using a toenail clipper correctly. if you were affecting the skin behind the toenail. Yeah, the force should be sort of downward, not pulling toward you. You're not supposed to be pulling the whole nail.

I thought it was just going to be that she's going to start pulling nails off of her. I didn't expect the long strip of flesh. Bad enough as it is. Yeah. So. I never knew this about you, Dan, that toenails are a thing for you.

I mean, just, I mean, not, like, I'm not grossed out by toenails, but I'm grossed out by... I'd hope not. Long claw toenails that then rip off your leg. I guess so. Like two claws.

Yeah. What's the movie, what's the movie where the guy's teeth are coming out and he just can't stop pulling them out of his mouth and you're like, that's a bad dream I had.

No, there's some movie, I forget what was, there's some movie where a guy, listeners right in, there's some movie where a guy,

he realizes this, one of his teeth are loose and he just keeps pulling the rest of them. And I remember watching him like, just stop pulling him, dude. Just stop removing them. You don't need to take all of them out.

Probably, I mean, I feel like we're not addressing root causes here. Yeah, yeah. On the roots of the teeth, yeah. No, I've definitely seen that scene. I know what you're talking about.

The fly is, but fly is just like one of them comes out, right? This was one where the guy just couldn't stop himself from removing all of his teeth. Yeah. He's going to even it out. And then it's like, no, no, it's not even. Yeah, so it's like shaving his, it's like cutting his own sideburns, basically like, oh, man, they're three inches above my ears. Finally, I'm rescued from the tyranny of teeth, he's saying to himself.

And when they do track down... I can finally go to an all-smoothy diet. Yeah, yeah. Well, when they do finally track down Katie, she is holed up in the walls, using some kind of like metal to like scratch at the gaping wound on her leg. She does a lot of going, we're like chattering their teeth a lot really fast. Like a lot of scenes, she just ends.

And then nothing seems to have happened. Her legs all bound up. It is this movie, it's almost like at the end they would finish editing a scene or writing a scene and then they would just be like, let's set that aside. We don't need to look at that anymore. Where were we when that last scene ended? I don't remember. Let's just start over again from the beginning.

And so these things keep happening. and the parents have no reaction to them other than a general growing sense of anxiety but you'd be like, well the first thing you would do is take this girl to the hospital, right? When this is happening? Like you call in help probably at this point. These are all short episodes

of the Lee Cronin's The Mummy Quibi program. Yeah, this was a vertical that they turned into a film, yeah. So what the fuck is going on guys? Well, let me tell you the wall inspecting the strips of flesh hanging from the wheelchair, Charlie discovers that

There seems to be some kind of writing on the skin. What? On the inside of the skin? So he starts to separate all the... He separates the skin. It turns out that the skin is not really skin, but like parchment or something, covered in what appears to be hieroglyphics, or we will later learn to be a language even older than hieroglyphics.

Hieratic writing, yeah. So he tracks down a college professor. They had not yet invented pictures when they made this language, yeah. He tracks down the college professor. Of course, probably this dude loves the band. Nile. He's probably cranking Annihilation on the Wicked on a

evilist sounding voice that a college professor expert in a movie could possibly have. And he gives him the skin and he's like, well, looks like this stuff is like, it keeps mentioning this dude,

the Namoranian, or Nazmaranian. Nazmarian. Nazmarian, who's an ancient demon, you know, long before Christ, a destroyer of families. And you're like,

okay, I guess I knew where this is going. Little on the nose, yeah. Now, this was, did it bother you at all that Nazarianian doesn't really sound, and it could be wrong, doesn't really sound like an Egyptian sounding name to me. Mm-hmm. It's probably a holdover from when this script wasn't about the mummy.

That's very possible. All right, yeah, that's very possible. Okay, so back home, Charlie discovers that Katie in bed, she's chattering her teeth and she's doing Mamma Morse code. So he goes downstairs. Not my mummy code. That would be a higher lyrics. Yeah, he tracks down, thank you.

He tracks down the, he writes down what she's chattering about. Goes downstairs and he uses her old Morse code book to determine what she's saying. She's saying Layla over and over and over again because that's a favorite song. Every item in her Girl Scout's trunk. He has very little urgency until he's actually translating. And then the camera work and the editing are hilarious. You would think writing down something. on paper was the most exciting thing that could ever happen.

I was like, I love it. It's so pulse-bounding, but first he had to go through his trunk of memories. But anyway, it says... And also, for it to say Layla over and over, doesn't equal the reveal I was hoping for with the intensity of this sequence. Like, if it was like, help me, I'm trapped in here or something, I'd be like, okay, that works, but no, it's just a name over and over.

If the dad was like, oh, she wants to see her friend Layla, okay. I can't even get track of my kid's friends. anymore. He goes to his wife, do you know this Leila? Yeah, it's Katie's best friend. Do you not know who Leila is? I don't know. I thought it was one of your work friends. Excuse me? Do you not even listen to me when I talk about work? I thought it was a world famous kidnapper. Turns out it is related to a kidnaper. So he reaches out to Detective Zaki who traces the name and the, oh, and then she suggests, you know, it might be related to her disappearance. So he goes. goes through a big trunk of letters that people had sent when she was missing. And he finds one that is covered in like the chocolate wrappers that Katie had been given. And it's from Layla saying, I wish this didn't have to happen to you. We'll later find out that this is written by the daughter of the wizard lady who had kidnapped her.

The magician. The magician, sorry. Had befriended her. Well, she works at Wizard magazine, though. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah. I wanted that job so badly when I was 14 years old.

I just wanted to be the casting guy. I got to pick which celebrities. Which football players are going to play with X-Men? All you have to do is figure out again how are you explaining that Howie Long should be Venom, Glenn Danzig should be Wolverine, Jean-Claude Van Damas Gambit. It's the same people every time. Yeah, same people. Well, there's an art to it.

So. Tia Carrera, Silo. It's the same people every time. Yeah. Okay. So this, they kind of work together, and Detective Zaki finds that traces it to a nectarine farm, which matches the crime scene of where she was abducted.

She finds this nectarine farm in Oswan, Egypt. So she goes there, and she finds this nectarine farm and the family house that we saw at the beginning of the movie. She explores it. She goes down into the basement, very spooky style. Does she see the pyramid, the basalt pyramid? She finds the pyramid. She goes down, but where's the sarcophagus?

We obviously know it's gone. She kind of explores a little bit. And then as she comes up, this is classic. This is like classic scary video game moment. Because you go through the house initially, it's spooky, but there's no monsters. It's empty. But then when you come on the way back,

that's when the monsters show up. So you have to use your memory of what the house was like to get out. So when she gets up there. Which is not what happens in the movie. I mean, she doesn't use her memory of the house to get out. She just shoots people. I mean, she doesn't need to. No, she goes into her inventory.

She selects gun. She selects gun. She hotkeys and used on. I didn't realize it was a point and click. It's an old one. I didn't realize this was the Sam and Max hit the road of this movie, yeah. So when she gets upstairs, the magician is returned. The magician attacks her with a net.

knife, but she is shot, and the detective then sees the daughter Layla running away. She chases her. Layla is simply leading her to a old lunchbox that's buried out in the desert. On a cliff. On a cliff. A lunchbox that features a VHS tape, and I'm like, that's got to be bad for the tape, right, out there in a desert. It's not a good way to store it now, yeah.

So, I mean, those things don't last very long, right? I mean, they're one taken care of properly. They can last a good time, but burying them in the hot desert is. not going to do that. Yeah, yeah. So it's a VHS tape that just has Katie written on it. Uh-oh, this looks like evidence. Later on, she will interrogate this Layla and Layla is missing her tongue because she spoke out against what was happening and reveals that it is all tied in with this family curse where they have to protect people from this Nazmaranian by transferring the spirit from one host to another host. And then Mama.

the host so that the Nasmranian is trapped inside of that. Trapped inside it. So, of course, Detective Zaki's got to hop on that concord. Head over to Albuquerque. Meanwhile, in Albuquerque... She doesn't go to Albuquerque the classic way, which is burrowing under the ground. Yeah. Just leaving just a, you know, a line of dirt that pops up, yeah.

So, meanwhile, back home, Katie, now the Nazmaranian, their powers are growing because they got some of their... It's so funny if she's like, I call myself the Nazmaranian. Now, like, does you seem weird to you that Katie signed her school papers, Nazmarian? Nasmeranian. Her powers are you going to look up in Wikipedia? Nah, we don't need to look that out. We don't need to look that up.

Yeah, I mean, do you, yeah, yeah, let's pick up a baby name book to see what the meaning of it is. Let's see what it means. Deathbringer, oh no. Destroyer of families. The, uh... Nasmranian, that's beautiful. It's ancient Egyptian for destroyer of families. Oh, it doesn't sound ancient Egyptian.

Oh, well, it is, according to the movie. So Katie's powers are growing... If we had a demon reveal party for the baby. So Katie first starts messing with the youngest child Maude and starts possessing her. She coaxes her over to her doorway with honeyed words and then licks her toes. If you want to see Be Arthur possessed by a demon, this is not the movie for you. I apologize. She would have been great in this role, though, right?

Is the little girl? You don't think so. It really starts off like the... The possession of the family, though, really starts off by just sort of making them like dicks. I mean, she possesses Maude and basically just means that Maude just uses the C word a lot. Like, that's pretty much it. And, yeah, I mean, it's not like, she doesn't, later she possesses the brother and it just means he just kind of skulks around. Andy helps her escape from some of her skin bindings.

So then later on. So was the idea, so wait, so was the idea that she starts, getting really powerful because the mom, when she was clipping her nails, first started removing the bindings by accident? Okay. I think until now I totally missed that. That that was anything other than a creepy gross out that had any effect on the story. So later on, while the family is doing other stuff, the grandma is spending some time with Katie alone.

They have lives outside of Katie's predicament. They can't just be hanging around the house all day being what's up with Katie. Let me look at Katie. At that point, I think they're making excuses to get away. You know, like Maud is at school using the C word of a bunch and getting in trouble. I could really use a toothpick. Let me go run down to the grocery store

and get some toothpicks. They'll come back. Oh, you know what we also needed? Batteries. Honey, are we out of lip balm and no we've got a bunch of it? Well, we can't have too much. I should probably get more. It's pretty dry here in Albuquerque, right?

Let me check the weather. Yep, it's going to be dry tomorrow. I should probably see if OfficeMax has that new printer paper in. Anyway, you've got Katie, right? Okay, bye. You'll handle Katie. See ya. On my phone, I saw that there's a new three-ply toilet paper.

I should... I mean, it feels stupid not to go by them. I should check that out. For the same price. An extra ply for the same price. You said you wanted to try it. At the CVS, they had, at the magazine stand, they had like a time life special all about the history of Dungeons and Dragons.

I should make sure there's still a copy of that. I wanted to get a copy of that. Yeah. So, you know what? I just remembered they had one about Sherlock Holmes, too. Just the history of Sherlock Holmes. It's a special. You know, it's not like a real magazine.

It's just kind of like a special issue that's all about this one thing. It's not quite a book, but it's not quite a magazine. It exists in sort of a liminal space. Let's call it a magazine. Let's call it a magazine. I should probably get one of the. I should go back here.

I should go patent. magazine as a phrase. You know what? I should go down to the copyright office and make sure that the word magazine hasn't been trademarked already. Because I'm sitting on a gold mine right here. And Katie's, with Katie's special needs, we need that money. So I'll just go down there. Oh, the local copyright office, the closest one is in, is actually in Arizona. Well, I guess you can handle Katie for a couple days, right? I just got to head over and take care of this thing, you know. And the lamination on my library card is peeling a little bit, so I should head over there and just refresh that bad boy. I should just get another one of those. I mean,

Reading's a lifelong journey, you know, and you've got to keep up. And as I said, it's pretty dry around here, and that can be nightmare on your lamination. Oh, yeah, yeah. If that lamination comes off the card inside, it's going to get brittle. It's going to drive and get brittle,

and we can't have that. Because what if, I mean, with this Katie situation, we need a lot of specialized information. And the library is the best source for that. I mean, really, it's America's greatest idea next to the national parks. You know what? I haven't been to a national park in a while.

I should, you know what? I could get in touch with nature again. That's why they're there. That's why they're there, yeah. You got Katie, right? Okay, cool, cool. Speaking of getting Katie, Katie uses this moment alone with her grandma.

Get, Shorty. How long has it been since we saw Get Shorty? You love that movie. I'll just hop down on the video store and pick that out. And I'll go to the library and get the book. Do you know they made a TV show? Let's try it out. You know what?

It's technically streaming, but I should get the DVD set from the library. I feel like that's, got to support them. Gotta support him, yeah. I should go to Hastings to see that. You know what, Elmore Leonard wrote a sequel to get Shorty called Be Cool. I never read it. I should go to the bookstore.

You know what? I bet they'll have it. They probably turned Elmore Leonard's house into a museum or something. I bet that's for sale in the gift shop. I should go over to Michigan and pick that up. Really support the Elmore Leonard Foundation. So using this moment alone with Grandma, Katie uses her magic powers to beat up Grandma

and torture her. make her jump out the window, where she crashes onto the hood of Charlie's arriving car, which elicits many giggles from the possessed maud. Yes. And then grandma... Are they horrified enough to think maybe there's something larger going on here? No. Not yet.

Nothing would indicate that. Yeah. And then she was dragged off... She seemed like she was going to jump out the window, but I don't know. No, you don't know her. She's just all kinds of stuff. You can't control her, yeah. She's then dragged off the hood of the car by angry wolves who disembowl her while

she's still alive. Not wolves, coyotes. And this is another thing that I found very funny was they go out. There's a bunch of angry coyotes bearing their teeth at them. And just at their house, and they're like, oh, let's ignore this. And I found funny for two reasons. One, don't leave the house if there's a pack of angry animals of any kind waiting for you. Two, I deal with coyotes a lot in my everyday life.

I see them a lot in person. Yeah, you say meep, meep and run away from them. I do. Well, the thing is, all I have to do is paint a road on the side of a big boulder and they just slam themselves into that, you know. But coyotes are pretty. Unless they are sick in some way, they're particularly meek animals.

They are not looking for a fight and they're very easy to get along with. So they're like, uh-oh, coyotes. I was like, there must be a scarier animal for them to bring in than coyotes. I don't know. Yeah, but I would imagine these ones are like magically driven by the will of Nazmaranian.

They're magically maddened by the Nazarianian. So it is, that is a pretty, that's a fun gross out where the mom runs up to the window, looks down, sees her mother being disembaled by coyotes. and her mother's like screaming while it's happening. You're like, that's pretty crazy. This is pretty intense. It's over.

The madness is done. Yeah, that's the last of the gross crazy scene. It is a very intense scene. I want to say, like, this movie works in certain scenes in terms of like over-the-top, gross out. Oh, that's more extreme they thought. Again, does it work as a mummy movie? This is where I have my main issues, yeah.

No, it's very much, this is very much the evil dead poking through. Yes, I will also say that most of the bad things that happen to children, women, older women, which is, again, like the most vulnerable members of the family in some ways. And I don't, again, don't love that just from the things I enjoy to watch for, enjoy watching for fun. I would so much rather see a male body which can handle a bunch of, you know, a guy in the prime of his life, real fit, a grown-up dude. I'd so much rather see him get ripped apart. A Bruce Campbell, you're saying. A Bruce Campbell, yes, exactly.

than an old woman or a child, yeah. Old men, that's a little bit of a gray area. There are certain old men. I would love to see who get ripped apart by coyotes. I mean, if we can choose who's going to get ripped apart, then yeah, for sure. Can we do some libel here? Can we be in trouble? Can we say some crazy shit here?

I mean, it's not libel. Can we start naming names? Can we say anyone in particular? I just said there's certain people. Certain people who are ruining certain things. Yeah. For certain everyone. Certain bad people doing bad things who are bad.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, coyotes. Yep. Okay, so of course, you got to have a funeral. Again, coyotes are not the animals you're going to want to use for that, though. No, that's true. Luckily, they decide to have the funeral at home, which is perfect for chaos.

So they have the... Chaos Katie is going to work her magic. I actually feel like this sequence would have been way more fun. if they had gone to a funeral home. Yes. It would have also made more sense why they then are able to kind of shrug it off a little bit afterwards.

You handle this. But this is when the movie, I wish it had gone even a little further because it starts getting into like dead alive territory here in terms of like the just over the topness of what's going on. Okay. So during the funeral,

the Katie is locked up in a room. I think, you know, parents know something bad's going on. Maude is downstairs pulling her teeth out one by one and spitting blood all over the deviled eggs and then That shows there's a demon in the house

Because those aren't just eggs Those are deviled eggs Even the eggs are killed with evil Easter egg for you Not an Easter egg Dan Easter egg represents rebirth And the promise of Christ Yeah for new life

I think Sebastian starts hearing Katie's voice in his head around now Or maybe that's later I didn't write that right down He's like guarding her room, but then he starts hearing her voice in his head. Yeah, yeah. And then he, like, puts on headphones and he's still hearing her voice.

Yeah. Because he was listening to that one album that she put out after she became a mummy. So now that all of Maude's teeth are out, she goes over to Grandma, and she pulls out grandma's dentures and then starts attacking a man, an old man. And then Katie has punched a hole through the floor and dragged her, like, spider demon body out and she runs over and jumps into the coffin and starts

devouring grandma. Yeah. And yeah and then they like everybody screams and then it's just kind of done. Katie, the coffin already ate the best part. That's the, you're stuck with the leftovers. The coffin falls over and Katie is just licking, lapping up human remains off the ground.

Embalming fluid. Embalming fluid, yeah. Because she's a mummy. She loves that stuff. If she was a mummy character in a video game, that would replenish her health bar by looking up in balming food. That is the equivalent of a barbarian's turkey leg. Yeah, yeah.

In Lechrome is the mummy for the S&ES. That would be exactly how it works. Well, you get to play as the mummy, which is, you know, it seems like a misunderstanding of the text, but I think it works. So let's, yeah, because this is the moment, this was the moment where the movie broke for me to a certain extent, which was

that you have had this very public disaster funeral where one daughter has attacked a man. The other daughter is eating the corpse of the grandmother and people are screaming, everyone's seen it, the floor is a mess and then they cut to that night and it's like, oh boy, what are we going to do

about Katie? It's like, wait a minute. Rough day, huh? You're telling me that like nobody called child protective services, the police, the room is still not messy. Like, did they clean it up? Like, this is the kind of thing that if it happens in front of the public,

there's no way you just have an evening after that. I thought that it's so funny that it was like a end of a sitcom. That's our Katie. And then the next episode, they reset right to the beginning, you know. So they, of course, are hanging around the house when just hanging around. They're not getting invited anywhere. They're pariahs after that funeral. At this point, Katie has been firmly tied up to her wheelchair.

And maud is locked somewhere. What was that? Do you think they still went to the burial? Like they had a car procession. They were like, all right, get her back in the box. I mean, grandma shows back up later, so we don't know. Yeah, that's true. Maybe they just left the coffin there, yeah.

So Detective Zaki shows up fresh from her Concord Flight. And she's like, you guys got to watch this video. And I'm like, calm down. Like, there's time to watch videos later. But she's like, no, you got to watch this video. So she makes... Not since my dad showed me Robocop when I was seven or eight years old.

Has someone been so excited to show a videotape to somebody else, yeah. So she runs in there and they... It was so funny if she was like, you guys got to watch this video and it's just her doing six skate tricks. She's like, check this out, check this out. Yeah, yeah. It's, yeah, this guy's gonna do a quick flip.

Look at this edit that this guy did where he throws shoes up in the air and suddenly they're on his feet. The... So she makes them watch this videotape, which is we've been dying for what happened to Katie. So we basically just see the ritual where the magician has a bunch of people

and they tie Katie to a board and then they suspend her over a mummy and then they do some chanting and then the mummy barfs like black stuff into Katie's mouth upside down. For a long time. And then they're like, okay, good to go. Let's tie her up and let's mummify this one.

Takes a lot to make a moment. Would you say, now, is the presence of the demon as a sort of liquid that can transfer a person or person? Is that a reference to Prince of Darkness and the kind of liquid devil? Or the hidden? But the hidden is like not a liquid. It's an alien that lives inside your throat. It's a sponsored content for liquid death. Oh, is that one it is?

The water that's finally cool. Finally water, that's awesome. It's pretty cool, though, right? It's got a skull in it. She's got a skull in the can, the coolest thing. I mean, the thing is that it normally, you know, water is a foundational element of life. No, water's for pussies.

Finally, there's a water with enough tea that Pete Higgs and drink it. Yeah, there's some water there. I'll put some hair on your scrote, Dan. Finally. Finally, people with Dan's been complaining about his bald scrote all these years. I've been dehydrated all these years because water isn't manly enough for me. Yeah. Yeah, you finally want to use that, what, that manscaped,

ball shaver or whatever. Yeah. Dan's only been drinking male urine because it's water that's gone through a man and therefore it receives some male essence. Yeah. So they watch this cool video. Meanwhile, some stuff's going on. Sebastian gets...

So cool stuff's going on. Sebastian gets loose and he, you know, he's possessed. So he goes in there to start letting Katie out. Maude is just like ramming her head against the door. Grandma shows up and starts attacking them. They are all, they're basically like running up and downstairs.

Grandma's like Evil Dead zombie type thing. And she spits a, she spits a scorpion into Detective Zaki's mouth. The scorpion then sticks it Stinger through her trachea. And then she like pulls it out and kills it, I think. It's pretty gnarly. And they... That appears to trachea is going to cause her some trouble a little bit later. Yeah, a little bit later.

So they run around eventually, I mean, eventually, in all the hijinks, Katie's like chasing them around. There's a ton of sand everywhere, which just kind of makes everything little shitty. It's going to get every place. Yeah, it's going to get everywhere. I hate it. It gets in your butt. It's so rough.

It's not at all like Natalie Portman's skin. No. You know, anyone who doesn't understand the reference is going to be so confused by you saying. That's a very creepy thing to say. If you're not familiar with the Star Wars prequels. Flint Marco must have been watching Attack the Clones and been like, what the fuck?

I feel personally attacked. You don't need to sub-tweet me with this whole movie. So you're saying I've got no chance with you, Hayden Christensen? Well, fine. And he pulls all the posters off his wall. He pulls his shattered glass poster off the wall. It's a good movie. Shattered hopes.

So eventually... Shattered glass is a good movie. It's a good movie. It's a good movie. Eventually, Charlie is wrestling around with his daughter, and Detective Zaki uses her hand to hold her trachea together enough so that she can then recite the magic words that she memorized watching the tape. NITO.

I liked her having to push her trachea back into place, although that's great. I thought it was unrealistic that she had memorized the spell. Very unrealistic. Very unrealistic. Very unrealistic. Was she practicing it on the plane? Yeah, probably.

She brought a little VHS player on the plane to watch. Yeah, yeah, probably, yeah. So, and of course, after reciting the words, Katie then barfs stuff all over her dad's face. Which, to be honest, that's going to happen if you're a dad. Your kid will barf all over you at some point. It's going to get in your mouth. You know, it'll turn you into a demon mummy.

It's going to happen. They transferred the Nasmeranian to Charlie. Flash forward. Don't sing cheer up Charlie to him. He will not. He has a nasmranian side of him. basically healed and normal again. The kids seem okay.

The kids are all right. Charlie, of course, is living inside of a black basalt sarcophagus that they brought over from Cairo. You got to imagine that the import paperwork must have been a nightmare to bring that basalt sarcophagus over from Egypt, yeah. And also, like, they would have taken forever. You would take so long, like, I hope the mummification holds pretty well. I mean, maybe they made a new one.

Maybe they made him a duplicate. Yeah, those are just lying around. You can just go out to the store. Unless I said made him one. I didn't say bought him one. Yeah, they went to Tomb Depot and just bought a basalt sarcophagus. And you're like, okay, well, I guess he's going to be, he's the new host. What are they going to do with that?

So, of course, we then cut to... Mummy episode four, a new host, yeah. We then cut to a hospital in... And here's the thing. If they ended the movie with, they just have forever, their dad exists in a sarcophagus, is just a mummy. Now this family has defeated the curse, but at great sacrifice.

I'm like, you know what? I didn't love this movie. But that is a, but that is a, that is a good horror movie ending. That's something, there's a, there's a traumatic scar on this family now because of this experience. They've been there.

That's a good horror movie ending. But no, no, no, no, no. This is the American family. Nothing bad can happen to them in the long run. So, Stuart, what happens? So they tracked down. We cut to a hospital in Egypt. The magician who had been shot has survived,

but she is in this hospital prison or something. And she's being forced to listen to the song that her family was singing to on the radio earlier. A very specific piece of torture. I don't know how they knew that she hated that particular song. And of course, the detective, Larissa, show up and they wheel in Charlie and he's all mummified. And he's the smuggest fucking looking mummy.

That look on his face, I was like, come on. I don't like that. Like that the mummy himself is like, yeah, you're about to get yours, bitch. Like, you know, paybacks a bitch, bitch. I was like, I don't like this at all. Yeah, this is where the, this is the stand-up and cheer him home into the movie. And then, you know, they're going to start reading the words and he's going to start barfing. And that's the end of the movie.

Here's the other thing. Do I agree with the magician's, you know, tactics? Do I think that maybe... Can argue with the results, though. Do I agree with her tactics? Are there maybe more deserving hosts for a... a mummy demon than just some innocent girl. Yeah, many of them are in the government right now, sure.

But, I mean, she is trying to... Just like, what if some coyotes just got loose? She is trying to keep the world... All we're asking. She's just trying to keep the world safe from the mummy curse. Well, she's trying to save her family from the mummy curse. She's part of a... All families, kind of.

All families, just... But I will say that one of the things about this is that... I mean, it is supposed to be turned about, like, she took an innocent girl and she did this, so now it gets brought to her. But there is also this implication where it's like if a non-American family has this curse, what are you going to do? If an American family has this curse, unacceptable. No, no, no, no, no. It is much better for someone in another country who is of another culture to have to deal with this punishment or this burden than for an American to do it. And that was one of those things where I was like,

again, I can't tell if this movie's really racist. Like not every Egyptian character in it is an evil magician, just one of the two most prominent characters in it. You have a heroic Egyptian character in the form of the police officer, but there's still that assumption of like, when something happens to an American, it is much worse than when it happens to someone in

another country. I mean, I feel like this last sequence feels like a tacked on after initial audience. That's my guess. Or the studio saying it feels like a tacton ending, for sure. This is the thing that will rescue Lee Cron's the mummy, they said.

Well, I think it does a score laughing and singing a song as opposed to sad. I think A, yeah, it leaves it on a higher note than the bleaker ending. And two, it also paves the way for another Lee Cronin's The Mummy. Well, will that happen? I don't know.

Well, let's do our final... Made money. Let's do our final judgments. As always, of course, is this a scummy mummy? A crummy mummy. Or a yummy mummy. Oh, you brought back all of our famous mummy categories.

Yeah. Yeah, it's just good. Which one did the Tom Cruise, the mummy get? Bad bad. Yeah, I think he got crummy. Crummy, mommy, yeah. Now, what's the difference between crummy mummy and scummy mummy? Scummy in my mind is good, bad.

Oh, okay, okay. Because I would think scummy is worse than crummy. Yeah, but that's why it's so good. Scummy has a disreputable charm, whereas crummy is just lousy. Just disappointing, yeah. Yeah, yeah. They're not like talking about Moes-Ey's being a hive

of crumb and villainy. That's true. Because Salacious Crum wasn't there at the time. Siraceous Crum and his brother are crumb. When Slatious Crum is the most balanced member of the family, you've got a problem in that family. They both have things for Thickens, though. One of the funniest things

about Slatius Crum is his name is officially Salacious B. Crum. And in my son's Star Wars Characters' book, it points out he is one of only two Star Wars characters with a middle initial. And I'm like, what does that middle initial stand for? You see other characters with the middle initial. The other one is a Wicked Wicwicket, or Wicke,

or whatever Wicke, T, or whatever Wicke's name is. So two characters who are the least expected. They're like the least likely characters to have that kind of... Middle names. You think certainly Senator Palpatine probably has a middle name. He doesn't have a first name. It's just Palpatine, you know? He must have a first name.

No, it's Sheave, right? It's Sheave, Palpatine. Oh, that's right. It is chief, yeah. I'm going to call this a crummy mummy. I will say that like, you know, Lee Cronin has taken some shots for his name being in the title. It's so just, I feel there's no way that he, I mean, unless he demand it in his contract,

this has to be called Lee Cronin's the mummy, which I doubt. Like, it's, it sucks so bad to be put in that situation where it's like, am I going to turn down having my name in the title? I guess not. But like, this is, it just opens him up for unnecessary criticism. And I will say his first movie, A Hole in the Ground, I liked Okay. His Evil Dead movie is my favorite of the new three ones, I said, you know, because I do think it has the closest to a sense of fun in those movies. It definitely gets sillier as it goes on.

Yeah. And the thing about this movie is, like, there's stuff in it that, like, I kept feeling like, well, I should like this. Like at the end, when she is holding, like putting a finger through a hole in her throat so she can talk because she's ripped a scorpion out of there. Like, I should like it. But the thing is my problem with this movie is it has set such a dower tone early on and has been so sort of like draggy and unpleasant for most of it that it doesn't have the sense of like fun I need for that gross stuff to do anything for me. I have gotten so bored by the movie that point. I find the parents to be like such non-characters. I find everything to just be sort of unpleasant

that I can't get into the stuff that is like silly and gross. So crummy for me, Stuart. Yeah, I'm going to say that this is a crummy mummy. It, you know, again, it has some charms. There's some style that I like. it's very gross at times, which is fun. But yeah, I think it's a bit of a mess. I think one of the biggest things is just how little personality

everything seems to have. Like even this ancient, like demon creature is just like, just basically becomes like a Freddy Kruger by the end, but without the charm of a Freed Krueger. Without the style and the charisma, yeah. Yeah, and the hat and the glove and the little five. Yeah, the whole energy. you know.

I mean, Freddie Krueger was not a child molester. He'd be, he'd be, he'd be lovable. Yeah.

Yeah. He'd be able to still get jobs in Hollywood. He wouldn't have gotten canceled by those parents who killed him in a fire. That's a real cancel. Yeah,

hard cancel. People are like, we canceled Liffreddy Krueger. No, he's just going to wait a while and then come back in dreams and kill our kids. Like, he's just going to ride it out.

Yeah. I agree. I also call this a crummy mummy movie. It's like I agree with you guys. There's some parts in it where you're like, I wish it had gone farther into Madcap, kind of like bonkers territory, but it really, I don't like seeing,

I really, there's just too much punishment made it out to children and the elderly in it for me. And I can't get over the fact, a big issue I have in the movie is the title, both the presumption of putting Lee Cronin's name so big when he does not have that huge body of work, but also that it's not really a mummy movie. Like it's not really about what's...

Instead of saying, well, what is it about the mummy that makes it a thing that has lasted as an idea for all this time? And they made so many other movies of that they just kind of slap the name on an exorcist demon movie, which is a totally acceptable type of horror movie, but call it the mummy, I want...

Put a mummy in there. Yeah, you know? Give me a mummy. Yeah, give me a desiccated skeleton covered in burial wraps. And not a desiccated skeleton. That's the thing. It's been preserved by that, you know.

You know, you're right. They give me a half-preserved corpse covered in rags that comes back to life and maybe it wants a lost love, maybe it wants some other thing. Maybe you just stole its treasure and it wants it back with it. Yeah, come on. And then a little second army of scarabs on you. Mm-hmm. So do you think this mummy has sandstorm powers

just because the mummy and the Brennan Fraser Mummy movies have sandstorm powers? Of course. Of course it is. What is manners? It's kind of a social dance that we've all about. Who is manners? Well, we reference Emily Post a lot.

Why is manners? Let's go back to royal etiquette. Schmanners answers all these questions. Through examining history, culture, literature, and more, we'll give you the ultimate insight on why we did it, how we do it, and why we still might do it today. So check us out every Friday on maximum fun.org or wherever podcasts are found. Manners Schmanors.

Get it? Good evening. Thanks for tuning in to 101.1. fun. It's midnight here on host to coast, and we've got Sarah from Michigan on line one. Hi, I'm calling him for some help. I used to love reading, but between grad school, having kids and the general state of the world, I can't seem to pick up a book and stick with it anymore. Sarah, this is an easy one. Just listen to Reading Glasses, a podcast designed to help you read better. Brea and Mallory will get all the pressure, shame, and guilt out of your reading life. You'll be finishing

books you love in no time. Great. That sounds amazing. Also, I do think my husband is cheating on me with Mothman. Can you help me with that one? Ooh, I don't think they cover that. Reading glasses every Thursday on Maximum Fun. Hey, folks. Today's podcast is brought to you by the good folks over at Squarespace. If you are listening to this podcast, you probably spend a lot of your time online. And, you know, if you want to upgrade your experience, if you want to take things to the next level, that's right. You need your own website. Maybe you are running a small business. Maybe you are trying to get paid and send invoices and schedule things and provide all those

things. Do online transactions, have a website, be a professional looking person, be a real individual. That's right. Squarespace is the place to go. That's right. I've always wanted to be a real individual. Now I know how to do it. You can be, Dan, you can not only be a meat space individual, but you can also be an online individual. No, that sounds dangerous. Thanks to Squarespace. Do it, Dan. Go for it. Come on. Squarespace provides you with everything you need to have a professional looking website,

including the ability to make on-brand invoices, online payments, streamline your workflow, and they also provide a full suite of professionally designed templates so that you, who may not be a professional decorator, designer, etc. You can just pick and choose from the things that they are already providing for you. Now, it has intuitive drag and drop editing, beautiful styling options, unrivaled virtual design effects. You need no experience at all. I believe they're visual design effects. Thank you.

Thank you. I said virtual. That's because I live in the virtual space and you can too by being online using Squarespace. So head to Squarespace.com slash flop for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code flop, that's F-L-O-P, to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Yeah. Let's take a moment to recognize that the Flop House is coming to you live in person in September if you live in Louisville, Kentucky, or are living close to Louisville, Kentucky, or have the ability to travel to. Louisville, Kentucky by Friday, September 18th.

That's right. We will be appearing live at the Whirling Tiger with special guest, Howell Doughty. You may know him as Alex Smith. He's going to be with us at the show. And we're going to be talking about what movie? The most glittering of all movies. Literally, the title of it is, Glitter,

starring Mariah Carey as glitter. I haven't seen it yet. I don't know if that's the name of the character or something they invent or what. But we will be there. Not the invention of glitter. It's the story. It's like that pop-

It's a good guy. That's Friday, September 18th at the whirling tiger in Louisville, Kentucky. Tickets are available. Go to Flophousepodcast.com slash events and you'll be able to buy tickets. I mean, I assume tickets are available. I actually don't know if they're still available. Go to Flophousepodcast.com slash events. Click on buy tickets and it will take you to where you can buy tickets to see us.

Yeah, find out for yourself. It's our first ever show in Louisville. We're very excited about it. Come see that tiger whirl. As always, I have some personal plugs I'd like to mention. It's the same old ones as always. My comic book Barbarian Behind Bars from Mad Cave Studios, those issues have come out, but you can go and pre-order the collected edition.

Let's say you're a Dan McCoy. You don't like to buy the individual floppy issues, so you can go pre-order the collection and you'll get it. Too floppy. Yeah. In addition, talking about floppy issues, Harley Quinn from DC Comics, I'm still right, and it comes out every month. Each floppy issue, those get collected too, but you might as well buy the floppies.

Why not? Enjoy it month to month. And of course, my book, joke farming is available now in audiobook. You can listen to me and read it to you, or you can buy it as a regular book and read it yourself, or you can get both and follow along with me as I go through the text with my own voice. And that's not floppy because you can hear it in your mind. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Floppy issues is a definite subset of my therapy sessions. What are you talking about? We're great. Oh, Dan, why are you getting defensive at the concept? that somebody might be talking about you at therapy. Okay, and if you are in the New York area and you love me and or comics, you can come see me host a panel

on the Adventure Zone graphic novel series, which just published its final chapter. I'm moderating a panel on the Adventure Zone graphic novels along with special guests, Carrie Peach, Ben Wilgus, Calista Brill. I'm very excited. This is at FlameCon, the world's greatest queer comics con. And it's going to be on Saturday, August 15th, at 5 p.m. at the New York Marriott Marquis.

Don't show up at 5 p.m. You'll miss it. You'll just be seeing me running, being probably carried out on people's shoulders for what a good moderation I did. And I am, I'd like to plug, being very comfortable with being talked about therapy. Because that's what helps. you guys be less mad at me outside of therapy. We'll see. It's like Oscar Wilde once said. The only thing worse than being talked about in therapy

is being not talked about in therapy. Mm-hmm. Great plugs all around. Yeah, great plug for Oscar Wilde. Let's move on from Lee Cronin's The Mummy. To what? Directed by Lee Cronin. Oh.

To... Oh, did Lee Cronin make this? Lee Cronin's the mummy? Let's answer some. some letters from listeners. Okay. Like you? This letter...

Uh-oh. Dear Lof-Hawpouse, my name's Lee Cronan. Have you seen my mummy movie? I love you guys. Oh, boy. This is from Finn last name withheld. Wolfard. I was going to say Finn McQuill,

the famous hero of Irish... What's it called? The folklore. I don't know. What is it called? This is going to be a bit more of a technical question the way you normally get.

Not that technical. High floppers, I've recently started running a free screening series at my work where I show weird or old movies, mostly to my friends at the moment, but the audience is slowly growing. I had every movie I wanted to show for the year planned out weeks before my boss gave me the okay, but on the night of the first screening, I realized that our projector screen is pretty square, meaning that I can only show films in Academy race. show. So far I've shown daisies, Bluebeard's eighth wife, the murder of Fred Hampton, and Tetsuoto Body Hammer. At work? Where do you work? Any recommendations for favorite or obscure Academy ratio movies would be appreciated, but I have a question for each of you. Elliot, as the former host of closely watched films at the 92-Y,

which Eastern European and Pre-Code films should I be showing? Stuart, since all of my full moon blue rays have been restored to 16-9, I can't show Castle Freak or head of the family. Any classic direct-to-video recommendations? Dan, how much goodwill do I have to build up with my audience before I can show them the great bikini off-road adventure? Finn, last name withheld. You've already showed Ted Snow 2 Bodyhammer.

I feel like the gloves are off. You know, you can show anything. I think, you know, as I am on record as saying, I think that the shining topmost achievement of the Czech New Wave is closely watched trains. Dan recently saw it and didn't like it as much as I do. But, you know, that's all right. But I liked it. I liked it totally.

But another one to show would be the Fireman's Ball, the English Foreman movie, which is really good and is in color also. In terms of, I mean, the thing is, the old movies are all in that kind of, or so many of them are in that ratio, that you have a plethora, a wealth of old movies to show. And a one movie I'll recommend,

because Dan also, I think, saw this recently is the musical Love Me Tonight. Dan, did you see it? Did you enjoy it or no? I did see it. I did enjoy it. It has a few, like, you know, things that to the modern sensibility are not so great. Like, there's a song that Chevalier sings that involves racism and abuse, both. Well, it involves abuse. That's one where it's the Apache song where he's singing, he's not, it's that's his song about, he's singing about being a French kind of. of like low-life criminal. And they were called Apaches in France,

which is racist. But it's not actually about Native Americans, that song. But he is thinking about his life as a low-life who beats his girlfriend and things like that. And it is sold as a comic song. So that one was a little harder to get through. But even for someone who's like, you know, I'm very used to being like, well, that was the time.

I can't do anything about it. I'll ignore that part for now. But yeah, otherwise, a very... Like, I was impressed by how much just, like, really silly humor is in there. I mean, like, and Chivalier is certainly likable in it, but I really liked the supporting cast of comic actors. But I would also, I'd recommend there's a bunch of, like, if you want to show Gold Diggers of 1933,

which is a great fun comedy musical from the 30s, if you want to show Million Dollar Legs, the W.C. Fields one, that is a, that's a movie that's so silly, it verges on nonsensical at times. But yeah, there's a lot of great movies. I mean, that's the great thing. If you're showing in that format, there's a lot of great old movies that are in that format.

What's the aspect ratio we're talking here? Academy. So it's like what, for three or something? It's as square as you can get. It's not letterbox, you know. Yeah, I was thinking of like a super square, super square movie. I remember the movie I would recommend, which doesn't really answer your question.

Oh, I'm sorry, academy ratio, I'm sorry, is 1.37 to 1. Yeah, that's what I thought. It is 4-3. All right. Yeah, so the movie I'm going to recommend doesn't actually fit the criteria of an old-timey one of like a VHS horror classic.

But I'm going to recommend Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale, which is shot in Academy ratio, and it is a harwing, tough experience to watch. And there's something about the tighter aspect ratio

that makes it feel more claustrophobic for me. Yeah, And if you're already watching Tetsu O2, then, you know, this is fine. You know what? I'm also going to recommend one of my favorite comedies, another comedy. That's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek by Preston's The Preston Sturgis movie. And, you know, I'll recommend another movie about this. The Devlin Daniel Webster, which is another, the, it's what Rubin Mamouillian, I think, directed that.

And that's a, that's a, not entirely comedy, but it's a good kind of like, oh, just William Dieterley, direct that. that's the one from 1941 is really good. So any of those, they're all good. Yeah. Yeah,

and I don't think you could get away with any of the bikini branded films. If it has bikini in the title, you probably shouldn't

show it at work. So I'm just going to go with a recent square movie, The Lighthouse, which the ludest that gets as a man

masturbating to a carving of a mermaid. We've all been there. He's hard up for material. But I, a movie, literally.

A movie I like a lot. And when Stuart and I saw the most recent evil dead movie together, there was a trailer for what is it, werewolf, the upcoming Robert Eggers thing. And I'm like, I leaned over to Stewart. I'm like, I've liked all of his movies,

but I wish he would go back to something like the lighthouse rather than, you know, continuing to mine sort of these, I don't know. Like, it feels like that is something, the lighthouse is something new and unique to him, whereas, like, there's these, like, classicism of, of, you know, doing this right after Nosphiratu doesn't feel as interesting to me.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. Anyway. Maybe the lighthouse is his take on, like, creature from Black Lagoon. Yeah. This second and final letter is from Patrick's last name withheld.

Who writes? In the first Max Fun Drive episode, the bonus episode, that is Transformers the movie, 1986, Dan raised several vociferous, even violent objections to the characters of the dinobots, e.g., their ability to breathe fire in their incorrect grammar when speaking. I don't think I had a problem. Anyway. Dan have no problem with grammar. Unlike the other Autobots, the dinobots were built on Earth by Wheeljack,

an Autobot race car scientist with a Brooklyn accent whose ears lit up when he spoke. Their intellectual shortcomings and inaccurate dinosaur physiology, such as Grimlock dragging his tail on the ground, are the result of the imperfect work of a guy whose other inventions frequently exploded. File under incorrectly regarded as goofs. Yours, Patrick, last name withheld.

That's a fair point, Patrick, and a good chance for me to remind people that members of Max Fun get to listen to bonus episodes. like our episode on Transformers, the movie. And I know that we haven't put out any new ones since them, but they are on the schedule to record coming up soon. We've just been busy. Yeah.

I will say maybe this is me being a snob considering the different types of fictional lore that I know the ins and outs of. I cannot be expected to know the lore of the dynobots at this stage in my life, Patrick. I'm glad that you're there to fill us in about it and to educate us on it. But, yeah, and I'm going to defend Dan on not knowing all the reasons for the DinoBots' scientific inaccuracies. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it would be weird if Dan learned a lot about an old-timey cartoon and the...

If Dan suddenly spent a lot of his life watching a cartoon for children, a cartoon made for children, and learned all the lore and really knew the episodes in such detail that he could recount them to people afterwards, it would be, that would be strange. It would not be the best use of his time. Very out of character. I just opened a letterbox in anticipation of us going on to our recommendations. And the first thing I saw on my feed was Jamie Loftus's review of the lighthouse. Oh.

Serendipity. Yeah. Wait, she reviews serendipity? And she would. But the place. The place. The place, not the movie. Yeah.

That coffee thing. It's delicious, I hear, or whatever it is. I don't know. They have like the million dollars Sunday or whatever. Sunday, I don't know. $1,000 pizza. I don't fucking know. Hey, man.

Hey, man. Let's move on to... Did Dan get high real fast? Let's move on to, what do we call them? Recommendations. Recommendations. That we've seen that might be worth our time. We've, you know, as mentioned in the previous mini,

We've not done a recording for a while because of various things during the summer, you know, travel, et cetera. So I have a backlog of movies that I've watched. And I'm going to give you two. I'm going to hit you with two. Whoa. Merry Christmas to us. I watched for the first time, 1979s Stalker, the Tartowski movie. I had put it off for a long time because I'm like,

an almost three-hour existentialist Soviet sci-fi movie. I mean, Dan, then makes it sound amazing. I could watch something stupider. No, I mean, like, it's true. Like, well, it was still on my list, obviously, but sometimes the energy to start a thing like that is the difficult thing. And then once I put it on, I immediately was like, oh, my God, this is like so gorgeous looking.

Like, there's so many fascinating things going on in the screen in every corner of the scene. And it made me think a lot about, you know, what we say sometimes when we talk about a movie being slow. Like a movie can be slow in two ways. It can be merely descriptive and not judgmental to say that a movie is pace slowly. And then there are movies that feel slow because there is no sort of propulsion between scenes like you're not

rare and to learn more about the story or there's a bunch of stuff in there that doesn't need to be in there that doesn't feel like it's been considered it's just kind of like junk clogging up the movie and I think stalker is the first type of movie

where it is slow but it is transfixing you start thinking about how little the camera is moving a lot of the time you know it'll fix on a scene and then things will move around within the scene and then the camera will drift off to the side and a new amazing thing will be revealed. And, you know, at the end, maybe it gets a little too like we're three men in a room like

talking out philosophy for me and loses a little bit of its magic, but it's a it's an amazing movie that I enjoyed all the way through. And then on the other end of the spectrum, that was a first time watch. This was a childhood movie that I saw a lot but hadn't seen for years and years. And that's a boy named Charlie Brown from 1969, the first theatrical Peanuts movie. It is an interesting movie, indently. It is beyond loosely plotted. It is, for the first half at least, essentially a bunch of blackouts and slightly long.

longer storylines taken directly from the peanut strip, kind of like just loosely knit together. Eventually, a plot emerges about Charlie Brown winning the spelling need, the local spelling bee going on to national spelling bee and or state. I don't know. I think it's worldwide. And that is also based on a storyline, but it has been changed and expanded. it captures the feeling of the strip so well,

but also it'll go off in these weird reveries. Like Bill Melinda, as the animator, you know, director, does a good job at translating what is essentially a very flat comic to animation, but then every once in a while he'll cut loose and do like something more visually interesting, including like an eight-minute sequence where Schroeder just plays. some Beethoven and we get some cutout animation. So it is both like funny and wistful and pretty. And it, you know, philosophically, it is a good movie about constant failure and persevering

in the face of just what seems to be a cold world. So when philosophy is discussed by three Russian men, that's too much for you. But when it's animated children, you're all over it. Well, when Linus says a perfect aphorism, and that's all, it doesn't go on for 20 minutes. Yes, I do prefer that. Well, I have in the intervening weeks, I did finally go to see a movie in 40X guys.

Oh. I went and saw backrooms in 40X. Really? Really a feel lost. Oh, yeah. And it was a lot of shaking around, wind blowing on my face. There was a fair amount of smoke in the movie where they shot like smoke canisters. It was pretty cool.

But I don't need to promote this very huge movie. I liked it quite a bit. But the movie I want to recommend today is a movie called Kill from a few years ago. This is a, I believe... Not Kill the Samurai movie from the 1960s, which is a great movie. No. Okay. This is a, I believe, Indian.

action movie that takes place almost entirely on a train where a commando is boards the train to try and convince the love of his life to not get married she's just been engaged and he doesn't want her to get married he wants her to run away with him her whole family's on this train but he stows away with his like he gets on the train as well with his like commando buddy and unfortunately that train is the target of a large gang family of robbers. And things get messy. It's like this very intense action movie, very much like The Raid on a train.

And at about like 30 or 40 minutes, you're like, I feel like I've probably seen everything this movie has to offer. And then the movie totally steps it up a notch and it gets crazy. And it also, like, it does a very good job of making the bad guys like a believable, interesting set of villains. And it's, yeah, it's just, it's great. And it's like, it's a little bit like, it's tongue-in-cheek enough where, like, it feels like the lead dude gets a guitar sting every time he, like, you know, flexes his muscles

and turns his lantern jaw at the enemy. It's great. And it also is, like, 90 minutes, which is, like, perfect. Like, lean and mean, gets in, gets out. Great. I'm going to recommend a movie that is not lean, doesn't get in get out in 90 minutes. Is it mean?

It is a little mean at times. And that is, I was recently on a long airplane ride, so I was able to watch a long movie that I'd been putting off, and that movie is The Secret Agent, possibly the least scene of the Best Picture nominees from last year. Heard good things. And so it was good enough that I am recommending it today on the Flop House. This is a Portuguese movie.

It's directed by, I'm going to mispronounce his last name, but it's by Mendonsofiliu, who also did the movie Baccaro, if you guys have seen that. He does some other movies too, but Baccaro was the one that I kept hearing about and watched right before this. And it is the story of a number of different characters living in Brazil in the 1970s

during the military dictatorship there and how dangerous it was to be someone who would run afoul of that. but it's also, there's a lot of life in it, there's a lot of fun in it. There's one sequence which is based on a historical thing that is so, like, lunatic. And I was like, what is going on? Hold on a second.

It comes out to nowhere. And I had to look it up to find out that it's based on a real thing. The, but it's a really great movie. It's really well put together. And I think it's not a movie where you're going to get like a kind of comprehensive ABC plot.

it's not a like straightforward thriller necessarily but it's a really good movie about kind of the feel of being in a place and the kinds of characters that would exist in this place and the lead actor in it Wagner Mara or Wagner Mura he was nominated for best actor and throughout the movie I'm like

yeah he's doing a pretty good job yeah this is pretty good and then his final scene I was like well this is a great performance like this last scene I thought the performance was fantastic like I'm seeing a person rather than a performance I'm seeing like a, it felt like the thing that I love so much about the performance in tar where I'm like, oh, I don't feel like I'm watching someone giving a performance. I feel like I'm watching this character existing, you know.

So I really recommend it. It's a long movie. It's almost three hours long, but it's well worth it. It's probably a movie you could watch in pieces if you really needed to. But if you happen to be on a plane from Geneva to the United States, like I was, or actually from France, the United States like I was, then go for it. Dial up the Secret Agent, kickback. Watch it. It was really good.

Okay, some very specific recommendations about where... This is the movie I recommend if you are on a work trip from France to the United States. Well, that was our show on Lee Cronin's The Mummy. Let's wrap this thing up. Thank you, Stuart. Thank you for that. Let's place the elements of this podcast into canoptic jars. Yeah, let's shove a hook up this podcast nose.

Rip the brain out and throw it away. Let's place this podcast in its tomb behind a series of booby traps, which will be broken through and looted over the centuries. This show is edited and produced by Alex Smith. He goes by him, Howled Doughty all over the internet. And you never wondered what he looks like in person. Come see us in Louisville, Kentucky. Friday, September 18th.

Yep. You took the words right out of my mouth. So thank you, Alex. Thank you to Maximum Fun. If you want to listen to a lot of other great podcasts on the network that we are on, maximum fun. Go to maximum fun.org. Check them out there.

Until next time for the flop house, I have been Dan McCoy. I'm Stuart Wellington. I'm Elliot Kalin. Not a mummy. Maybe someday. Let's hope. Bye. Bye.

On this episode, we discuss Lee Cronan's The Mummy. Lee Cronin made a mummy? I'll believe anything now. About mummy-hater, Lee Cronin? Him? Um, you want to go out? Somebody should do another one. We have to.

Okay, let me try another one. Let me try another one. Okay. On this episode, we discuss Lee Cronin's The Mummy. The movie that had all of America asking the question. Wait, who's Lee Cronin again? Okay. And let us begin.

Mine didn't hurt Lee Cronin's feelings. Yeah. Actually, but let me do another one. Let me do another one that won't hurt his feelings. Hold on. Mm-hmm. Maximum Fun A worker-owned network

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