Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 113

The M u m m y 109 help him stay alive throughout most of the film. We are never quite certain what to make of Beni, although we know we would not trust him very far. In the end, Beni’s luck runs out as his greed for a share of Hamunaptra’s treasure proves his downfall and he is trapped inside the city and devoured by the scarab beetles. These character and storyline choices suggest that Sommers is not certain what kind of film he really wants to make, despite claims to the contrary. As a result. The Mummy ]o\m another title of its era, Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man, as fantasies notable for unraveling the very building blocks that make genre films a treat. Rather than neatly interpolating the conventions of adjacent genre forms, these films lose their way as their directors flit among genre conventions to arrive at narratives that do not quite click for the industry-wise filmgoer. As Todd McCarthy says in his review of The Mummy in Variety, “[t]his touring company Indiana Jones tries to have it both ways, sending up the adventure genre for laughs while also going for some mild shocks, but the sand slips through its fingers on both counts” (1-2). Nonetheless, the film was the surprise hit of the 1999 spring season, assuring the future production of additional Mummy titles and an animated series for the television market.. Much has been written recently about the horror genre’s vitality with many critics agreeing with Ira Konigsberg when he writes, '•'■[h]oiTor films seem to have gone as far as they can legitimately go in horrifying people-the nadir has been reached and the genre, for all intents and purposes, is on its last legs” (Horton & McDougal, 251). If this is so, then it comes as no surprise that Stephen Sommers chose to interweave his film with additional generic constructs to tell his story. But one wonders what this film says about the contemporary film audience when a director feels obligated to repeatedly splice his horror scenes with standard comedic action-adventure fare. Have the old Universal horror icons simply run out of gas in their ability to give us the shudders? As noted above, both Francis Ford Coppola and Kenneth Branagh have given us contemporary re-tellings of Dracula and Frankenstein that ask interesting epistemological questions amidst their horror, thus suggesting that the basic theme of these two classics remains vital for the modern-day audience. Peter Bart has suggested in one of his weekly columns in Variety that our popular culture is strengthened by its ambiguousness and unpredictability (87). Stephen Sommers gives us none of either in The Mummy however, as he simply gives the film’s taiget audience what it seeks by way of action scenes, flying bodies, shock-cuts, and com puter graphics. In addition, the title ’s form ulaic characterizations pale in comparison to the major players in the original by giving us personaliti