Review of Mummy, The: Collector`s Edition (Widescreen)

Video

I did like this movie - it`s got all the right ingredients from the opening scene onwards:
Take "George of the jungle" (Brendan fraser), some stunning desert sets, a load of mysterious types in black and the bloke who did the voice for Bartok in Anastasia (Kevin O`Connor), then mix in some great special effects, a few mummies and evil himself (Arnold Vosloo), not forgetting some Americans for mummy-fodder, and you`re just abut there.
The budget for the movie was obviously fairly generous and there are some large set-piece combinations of huge stunts and amazing effects which bring "Raiders of the lost Ark" bang up to date. I was also fairly impressed by the fact that even though an American does, of course, save the world, he is hindered throughout by a group of his countrymen who are the stooges of the film - opening ancient caskets with "For God`s sake never open this casket" written on them, tripping over levers which set off the booby traps, and basically getting themselves into endless "whoops" type situations. After a while this had me softening slightly in my attitude towards our Stateside cousins, until the legend "Cairo, Egypt" appeared on the screen. Now, given that this is a movie about Mummies and is set in a desert landscape broken only by the towering shape of the Pyramids, I would have thought it fairly obvious that we were not dealing with Cairo, Illinois...
The plot is nicely interspersed with some slapstick and the odd one-liner. I particularly liked the scene where a mummy juggles with it`s own recently severed head as you would with a glass you were frantically trying not to drop on your kitchen floor...
Oh yes - the plot. This revolves around some old tosh about finding the treasure of an ancient hidden city which also happens to be guarded by the most evil creature known to man who must never be awoken but - oops I`ve opened this old book and now look what`s happened...you get the idea..

Audio

There are creepy breathing and shuffling type noises aplenty in this movie, which is no less than I would expect, but also some excellent "suspense jingles" and evil-wind whooshing kind of things going on.
DD 5.1 is used, he said, pretending to know all about industry abbreviations. Oh - just noticed the score is by Jerry Goldsmith, which explains things..

Features

Lots of stuff here for the anoraked amongst us - how to build a mummy, deleted scenes, special effects beards, production notes etc etc, even a game for PC DVD-ROM owners.
Oh - and some actual facts about ancient Egypt, for some odd reason.

Conclusion

Very entertaining, in Summary. Just the sort of thing to watch with jumpy people as there are lots of opportunities for grabbing their legs and shouting "WUH - HUH - HAR" in their faces.
It`s a pity that the bit of gore makes it that tiny bit over the top for the kids - I know that mine would love it. They may not sleep for a week, but hey, I will.