The Eternal: Kiss of the Mummy dvd movie.|
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List Price: $14.98 Our Price: $12.99 You Save: $1.99 Features • Anamorphic • Closed-captioned • Color • Dolby • DVD-Video • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 1998 DVD Release : 20 July, 1999 |
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The Eternal: Kiss of the Mummy description Michael Almereyda, whose unusual career finds him bouncing between personal experimental movies and genre pictures, is back in commercial territory with the supernatural thriller The Eternal, which was given the opportunistic yet appropriate subtitle Kiss of the Mummy to cash in on the success of 1999's The Mummy. Alison Elliot and Jared Harris star as an alcoholic American couple who travel to Scotland with their son so he can meet his grandmother and, ostensibly, so they can dry out. ("Ale isn't like alcohol. It's like food," she explains to her dubious son as she immediately violates her vow to quit drinking.) Unfortunately, they walk in on their crazed uncle (Christopher Walken), who is in the midst of reviving a centuries-old Druid witch--who looks just like Alison Elliot! Almereyda manages to create some genuinely spooky moments (the underwater photography in particular takes on a dreamy beauty), but much of the film has a slapdash quality, from clumsy special effects to awkward performances. The exception is Elliot, excellent as usual in the double role and conveying more with her eyes alone than many actors can manage with words, while Jared Harris offers a dead-on Walken impression in a humorous interlude. It's a gorgeous film with a marvelously eerie soundtrack, but the story is too slight to carry the tension through to the end. --Sean Axmaker |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Great potential that is never fully realized... |
| I really wish that Michael Almereyda had kept the alternate title for this movie, which was Trance. The Eternal: Kiss of the Mummy is a terrible title, and the cover graphics make it look like any other lame horror flick. But it's not.
The Eternal is traditional mummy/haunted house/zombie movie, but with interesting details. A woman who emigrated from Ireland at the age of 16 returns to her native country with her Irish-American husband (I think; Jared Harris looks like a short version of Conan O'Brien here) and their son. She and her husband are alcoholics and want to start over by reuniting with her grandmother and uncle. You can tell that they love their son, but they neglect him by drinking. It's not a typical mummy movie set-up, and it makes you see the characters as people and not just victims. It returns to conventions with the addition of her invalid grandmother, her crazy uncle, and the mysterious little girl he adopted. But even these have twists. The mummy is a Druid corpse and not an Egyptian one. Christopher Walken makes the uncle simultaneously hilarious and terrifying. And the little girl is the most sane one in the house. With the exception of the grandmother, who seemed one-dimensional, the characters are well-played. There are slight touches of other films in it: Psycho, Days of Wine and Roses, What Lies Beneath, even Straw Dogs. Michael Almereyda's Hamlet is one of my favorite movies, but since The Eternal obviously does not have Shakespeare's writing, it exposes Almereyda's weakness in plot development. Once the scariness sets in, the story becomes so loosely constructed that it's hard to determine what's actually happening. And that's how the film dies, so to speak. Overall, it's a good movie but not a great one. |
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