7 Mummies (2006)

So, I just finished a little flick called 7 Mummies. I don’t know what I was thinking seeing as the box cover couldn’t look more like direct to video trash and one of the stars is Cerina Vincent (thanks for taking it off in Cabin Fever, but we don’t think you can act, so get naked more). Well, I may not have known where my head was at when I started this thing, but I know where it’s at now, and it’s a bad place.

Rating:

A group of convicts being transported through the desert escape the van carrying them, grab the female guard (Cerina Vincent), and trek off in search of the Mexican boarder. All is going well, until they come across an old Apache (Danny Trejo) living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. He tells them of a lost wealth of gold, and instead of going to the boarder, the convicts decide to get as much money as possible. The problem is, when they reach the town, they find it populated by an odd assortment of people still living in the Wild West way of life. The sheriff of the town (Billy Drago) does not seem to like the random strangers showing up in his town, but allows them to stay. That is, stay long enough to find out that everyone in town is an undead zombie (or some such nonsense). So, now the convicts’ numbers are dwindling and the struggle is on to stay alive…and get the gold.

Now that you understand what we’re looking at here, why exactly was I drawn to watching this? It’s got direct to video stars, a generic as hell plotline and is really just boring. Well, I figured maybe Cerina would get topless again (my fault, I’ll just watch Cabin Fever again), and I thought, “Well, 7 Mummies could be cool if they just destroy people for the running time”. Another huge mistake. The mummies don’t make their appearance until much later on, and it’s very brief. It is cool to see cheesy random martial arts battles between the mummies and the convicts (made me think of the zombies in Raw Force – a much more entertaining shitty film).

The violence, as stated before, is a huge let down. Almost everything is off-screen except for a severed head that looks decent enough. When the undead attack the convicts, there are several major injuries dished out and blood flows pretty freely, but the meat of the attack is left up to the viewer’s imagination. I’m totally down with this as long as the sound design is strong enough to allow the audience to draw a strong mental picture of what’s happening. 7 Mummies felt like the director just wanted to throw in a generic sound and hope that it fit the scene.

Another problem is wasted cast. Yes, Trejo and Drago aren’t HUGE names (in the world of horror and B-films they are), but they’re usually very fun to watch and I felt like both were wasted. Danny Trejo gets all of one scene (that is stretched out in editing to make it seem like he’s in the whole film), and Drago’s terrifying (at least that’s what I think the director was going for) small town sheriff could have really upped the ante for the cast, but instead, he is relegated to the back side of the story and only comes out at the ‘right’ times to scare the shit out of the cast. Of course, he doesn’t actually come across as menacing and, therefore, the fear level drops considerably. Then there’s our star, Matt Schulze. He plays the badass leader of the convicts (you may remember him from Blade and Blade 2). Well, all he does here is threaten people and act like he knows what he’s doing when he doesn’t. If he was the leader of any gang I was in he’d have been offed a long time ago (then again, I would have been killed too). 

I would say something about the cinematography or the music, but honestly neither stuck with me. The shots looked about as generic as you could get, and whoever edited some of the action sequences together should be shot. We get it; you like to have two shots on the screen at the same time. Stop it. Towards the end there’s a sequence where our survivors are riding a motorcycle and they’re being chased through town by one of the undead on horseback. Sounds cool, right? Wrong. The chase goes on for a few minutes. A FEW MINUTES? The town could be walked through in that time. I get that they were trying to make it seem more epic, but couldn’t they have the guy turn the friggin’ bike to imply he’s going down a different street? Nope, same three boring shots over and over until the anticlimactic end. What’s playing the whole time this is happening? Metal. Because, let’s face it, nothing fits in a horror movie more then hard rock and rap. Wow. The guy didn’t even have the sense to actually score the damned movie. I’m sure there were some sequences where a score is playing in the background, but I’m not suicidal enough to go back and watch it again.

Overall, give this movie a huge pass. It’s not any good, and it’s not bad enough to be entertaining. It’s just…there.