7 Mummies (2006)

Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Two haggard old men are dragging a coffin full of gold coins out in the desert, long story short they're killed. Fast forward to present day which has 6 convicts escaping when their transport crashes in the same aforementioned desert. Taking the hot prison guard hostage, and on their way to the border of Mexico, they run into an elderly Indian (played by Danny Trejo!!) who tells them of how riches beyond their wildest dreams could be had buried under an old ghost town. They decide to take a detour to get this gold while Trejo laughs... for minutes on end. However all the denizens of said town are a little long in the fang, to say the least. The community headed by Drake (good ol' Billy Drago) has plans for these convicts. This flick while never something even approaching what someone might deem good, was enjoyable enough...up to a point. That point being when all the illogical nonsense going on got so high that I didn't know what the hell was going on, much less cared. It would have made an interesting 20 minute short MAYBE, but as a feature film, it meandered too often. Drago was the main draw for this one, as Danny Trejo, normally great, is just plain weird in the movie. Too make matters worse the nudity is very poorly lit.Eye Candy: it's very darkly lit, but Ananda St. James does bare her humongous rackMy Grade: D+

A shame this is so bad really, because I like bad horror movies and actually rather liked the basic premise: Back when the Spanish were being generally unpleasant to natives in America, they enslaved the local populace and got them to mine all the gold out of the mountains and basically ended up with a wet dream's worth of gold. Overseeing the operation were seven Jesuit priests that vowed to protect to gold until the Spanish forces returned for it. They never did. Over the years they died and were mummified and buried with the gold by the remnants of the native population. Fast forward a few hundred years and a bus load of convicts being transferred escape with one of the guards as hostage (the only good thing about the film, the delectable Cerina Vincent). They bimble across the desert looking for the Mexican border, finding en route a mummified body buried in a dry river bed with a gold medallion on it; when they later find a mysterious Indian (the always reliable, although poorly cast in this case Danny Trejo) who spots the medallion, he tells them the legend. Naturally, having just crawled out of the desert and barely survived, they decide to go back and try to find the gold, ignoring the Indian who is now laughing manically at their decision. They find the town, and most of them die. It's the vast majority of components that are wrong with this film.The dialogue was too quiet, even the slightest incidental music or sound effect totally washed out the dialogue, so you had no idea what was being said most of the time.The music was atrocious and very very loud, a mixture of gangsta rap and ultra heavy thrash metal, totally inappropriate and made the dialogue situation even worse.It was shot predominantly in total darkness, so most of the time you could not only not hear what was going on, you couldn't see what was going on either, I imagine it would be like watching a group of people being stalked in a windowless warehouse by Carcass or Napalm Death.Now when they got to where the gold was buried, there was a wild west style town there, complete with an evil sheriff (Billy Drago! Yaay! Who actually turned out to be the prime antagonist, not the mummies of the title), lots of random grizzled 1860's type western folk and the obligatory bar/cathouse populated with extremely buxom young lovelies. The gang of convicts do not question this one bit, they are not remotely bothered by the fact they seem to have slid back in time 150 years or so. The explanation for this is either simply not in the film, or is very briefly covered in sub-audible dialogue, but I gathered from a review that some wild west era settlers arrived there, settled, found the gold and woke the mummies, who subsequently killed the entire town and the inhabitants are now cursed.The convicts are enjoying the bar when the inhabitants turn into undead (terrible effects, ghouls look just like normal people, just with some blue eyeliner, right?) and the prostitutes turn out to be vampires (WTF??) that dispatch a couple of the convicts right there and then.The remaining convicts run around in the dark, breaking into boarded up buildings for no apparent reason, but they do eventually encounter some mummies, and they turn out to be ninja, high speed kung fu combat mummies with a propensity for crazy jumping around - to be fair, this is actually a pretty good fight scene (what you can see of it in the almost pitch black).The weird thing is that since things went belly-up in the cat house when the ghouls revealed what they were, the entire population of the town apart from the Sheriff has vanished. Eh? Why? No idea. The convicts spend the latter part of the film just being chased by the sheriff, the mummies don't even join the pursuit after their one fight scene.And the ending with two blokes and a coffin is completely random and meaningless, it's not anything to do with the rest of the movie as far as I can tell.I love crap movies, but please, this was dreadful in every conceivable way and it's not often I watch a lousy horror movie and think to myself "Wish I'd done something else, like maybe got some sleep".

Admitted, I love bad movies (eg. Evil alien conquerors) and horror movies, but this movie was however bad in a REALLY bad way. It made absolutely no sense what so ever, horrible lighting, disastrous camera work, acting, etc...It seems the people writing the script thought of "cool" ideas for a 30 minutes movie and then just filled in the rest with meaningless nonsense. I cannot believe anybody would put their names on this kind of crap.I could go on for pages about how horrible it was, but being the optimist I am, I will mention the only two good things about the movie: It was the first movie I have seen, containing Ninja-Priest-Mummies and it contained quite some large boobies. Besides that it absolutely sucked ass!Do not watch this movie without serious masochistic tendencies!

Hard core horror fans might be disappointed, but this film has some good action-adventure with an Old West twist, which makes for a fun time. Vampires, ghouls, a decapitated convict, bad-ass Old West Sheriff and deputies, lost gold, all make for an interesting story, much more than your standard slasher flick. The film contains an upbeat score and strong talent, including popular tough guys Matt Schultz and Andrew Bryniarski, Billy Drago as the wicked Sheriff, Danny Trejo as the old Apache, and a couple of hotties, Cerina Vincent and Adrianne Palicki, nice! Rapper NORE plays a decent part as a convict, who looses his head when chased him down off horseback with a cavalry saber! Opens a little slow, but picks up momentum when the convicts get to town, with some good chase scenes and stylized fight scenes choreographed by Hong Kong action director Tony Hueng. Special makeup effects look good, especially the scissors in the eye and decapitation. Definitely worth a look.