Seven Mummies (2006)
"Greed never dies."
Plot
Six escaped convicts and their female hostage make a desperate run for the Mexican border, only to hear out about the lost gold of the Tumacacori from a Native Indian. Stumbling upon an old frontier town, the group decide that the opportunity to look for the treasure is too good to pass. However, they don't realise that the town's population are vampires and that they don't want anyone stealing their precious gold.
Review
Imagine sitting down to watch a film called Seven Mummies and it turns out the villains are vampires. And by the time the credits finally roll, you would be hard-pressed to count seven mummies anywhere on the screen. So, already being misled by the film's title, you'd look at the cast list on the front cover and it's full of genre and character actors like Danny Trejo, Cerina Vincent, Billy Drago, Martin Kove and Andrew Bryniarski. Again, a misleading venture as most of these guys aren't on screen for that long and seem to have been thrown in there for name recognition only to put on the DVD cover. Welcome to Seven Mummies, a really confusing and very cheap From Dusk Till Dawn rip-off.
Seven Mummies is one of the sorriest films I've seen for a long time - and I watch a lot of bad films. Sometimes I just can’t get my head around the ideas that films are trying to present – the above plot sounds simple enough to follow but what ensues is a ridiculous mishmash of ideas of which no attempt has clearly been made to get them to work cohesively. The story starts with a very straightforward functional setup with the six escaped convicts and their female hostage making this desperate run for the Mexican border. You have built-in stakes. You have a ticking clock with the law in pursuit and a very clear geographic goal. But instead of utilizing that momentum, the director essentially hits the explode button on the plot. Upon hearing Danny Trejo's wise old Native Indian exposition dump about that lost gold, the convicts just decide to take a detour to an old frontier town. The cons can either escape across the border or go and look for some mythical treasure, so what do they do?
The town they stumble into is entirely anachronistic - it makes no sense. It looks like it was ripped straight out of the 1800s Wild West. Everyone is dressed like a cowboy, speaking like a pioneer, and yet our hardened escaping convicts do not question this massive temporal anomaly for a single second. The incredibly colourful reason for their oversight – they are completely distracted by "getting their leg over." They prioritise their basest impulses over basic situational awareness. It's ridiculous. That distraction doesn't just ruin the logic of the scene; it completely alienates the audience. If you were an escaped convict running for your life, your survival instinct should be dialled up to eleven. By ignoring an obvious threat, it just proves these characters have zero survival instinct. Who are we even supposed to be rooting for here? If the characters don't care about their own survival, how can we? There is no emotional anchor. We need someone to root for or at least a compelling anti-hero whose survival we're invested in, but this film just creates a complete moral vacuum. The townspeople are eventually revealed to be demonic monsters, but the convicts are written as these irredeemable, unlikable people – complete assholes. Tension requires someone to lose something of value. If both sides of a conflict are completely awful, the stakes just evaporate. If the vampires kill the convicts, fine. If the convicts shoot the vampires, also fine. The audience just don't care either way. We’re just left watching unpleasant people do unpleasant things to each other
The writers have confused character flaws with narrative depth, and that fundamental lack of logic in the character writing it bleeds directly into the design of the villains themselves In execution, the rules governing these villains are incredibly inconsistent. Some of them leap around with their fangs bared, acting very much like traditional vampires. Others just stand there, completely rigid, basically waiting to be shot like Romero-style zombie. Establishing the rules of your monster is the absolute most important requirement of the horror genre. If you're facing a vampire, the audience knows the characters need sunlight or a wooden stake. If it's a zombie, you know, they need to aim for the head. But when a threat has no defined rules, the audience cannot anticipate how the characters might survive. The tension is entirely deflated because the mechanics of survival are just a total mystery.
About halfway through Seven Mummies, there's this tension-breaking climax in a bar where the townspeople finally reveal their true monstrous identities to the convicts. It’s the best moment in the film but there’s a huge caveat because the sequence is lifted almost shot for shot in its pacing and structure directly from From Dusk till Dawn. Tarantino’s enjoyable nonsense famously executes that exact same mid-film genre shift in a bar, becoming an iconic sequence. Plagiarising a legendary scene doesn't elevate a bad film like Seven Mummies. It just acts as a neon sign reminding us that we could be watching something much, much better. The writers couldn't organically build tension or pace an action sequence themselves, so they essentially just traced over the blueprints of a successful film. But because they didn't do the foundational work to earn that sequence, everything falls apart immediately after (as if it wasn’t already falling apart before that scene!).
The writers just don't know what to do next. The entire second half of Seven Mummies just devolves into a mess. It's just an evil sheriff and his cronies chasing the survivors around with no clear objective, becoming almost impossible to even tell what is going on at that point. It's the cinematic equivalent of a scattergun approach. The filmmakers realised their story is failing, so they just throw every possible monster, trope, and stolen idea at the wall in this desperate hope that something strikes a chord. The film has a running time of a meagre seventy-nine minutes, which barely qualifies as a feature film. Yet without any narrative momentum, those seventy-nine minutes drag on forever. I was just shuffling around and twiddling my thumbs.
The visuals are surprisingly competent. The technical execution, the camera works, the lighting, the production design, it all looks highly polished. It looks significantly better than a typical low-budget movie should, but I think this just makes everything else look worse in comparison – a highly polished look makes a terrible script feel deeply insulting. If a film looks cheap, gritty, and poorly lit, you can kind of forgive a bad story. It has that underdog charm. You assume they were passionate filmmakers who just didn't have the resources or the experience. But if a movie looks polished, it proves they had the technical know-how. They had the equipment, the crew, and the budget to make a real film. They just completely neglected the story and it makes the bad writing feel almost intentional.
First-time director Nick Quested makes all sorts of mistakes, from the rock and rap music blasting over the dialogue to the constant fade ins and fade outs and, though he’s not the only director guilty of this, plenty of gimmicky editing. There's just no need for the overkill that's added. And finally, as I said at the start, despite the big cast of known names, you won’t see many of them for long with most of them having glorified cameos. In a hilarious bit of casting, Noel Gugliemi, who has made a career for himself out of literally playing the same character called Hector, stars as yet another Mexican gangbanger – only this time he’s expanded his range to become a character called Santos.
Final Verdict
Seven Mummies looks highly polished and at least it looks way better than its budget would suggest. However that's the only thing this film has got for itself. It's a plagiaristic and downright pathetic mess of incoherency, inconsistency and lack of intelligence - you have been warned! At the time of writing this review originally, Seven Mummies held a place in the bottom 100 on IMDB. Whilst I don’t think it is that bad, and I’ve seen a darn sight worse, the general feeling of this being one of the worst films you’ll ever watch won’t go away.
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Seven Mummies Director(s): Nick Quested Writer(s): Thadd Turner Actor(s): Cerina Vincent, Billy Wirth. Billy Drago, Andrew Bryniarski, Danny Trejo, James Intveld, Martin Kove, Noel Gugliemi Duration: 79 mins |  |
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