The naked and the undead (Attack of the Virgin Mummies (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Attack of the Virgin Mummies (DVD)
Date:	03/08/09 (77 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: I can't think of a single advantage

Disadvantages: It's painfully bad

A film only review. This one will cost about £7 to get on region 1 DVD through amazon.

Like most men of my generation, much of my leisure time is spent pursuing the higher arts. There's nothing I like better than putting my feet up and listening to some Mahler, perhaps composing a few quick haiku as I do so. Ah, how sweet is the life of the cultured bachelor.

But men have certain needs. There are times when the well-thumbed copy of The Brothers Karamazov must be laid aside while one turns one's thoughts to earthier matters. But as you head into your late 30s, frankly it can be a bit of an uphill struggle, if you catch my drift. A certain amount of visual stimulation can provide a welcome fillip.

So I turned my jaded gaze on Attack of the Virgin Mummies (2004), a straight-to-video softcore porn film that I hoped would be less boring than other porn because it has a mummy in it. I was disappointed. Modern softcore porn (and modern ultra-low budget horror) is unendearing and tedious. This particular effort is so bad it wouldn't even have been shown on Channel 5, back when Channel 5 showed this kind of thing.

In 'Ancient Egypt' three (white) princesses are skinny dipping in a lake. Three brothers encounter them, and while two of the brothers quickly get it on with two of the princesses, the third brother, ugly, fat Klarus, repulses the third sister, so he ends up killing her. And then he kills the other two princesses, and his own brothers. He is executed and mummified. This takes up the first 20 minutes, and is the set-up for the rest of the film.

I'm not going to try to explain how, because it's not worth the effort, but the three princesses are resurrected in modern times and end up working in a failing Hollywood strip joint. Evil Klarus returns as a mummy, and embarks on a murderous rampage as he tries to track the princesses down. Oh, and his two dead brothers have somehow been reincarnated as the strip club owners.

This is witless garbage, obviously. The sole purpose of the film is for naked women to stand in front of a camera and wobble a bit for our delectation. The plot shows signs that the people responsible would rather be making something more impressive, but nothing suggests that they'd do better with a bigger budget. The filming is competent enough, I guess, although most of it just involves pointing the camera at naked women; but the editing is abominable. The gauche opening credits show over-enthusiastic use of cheap post-production software. And the sound effects have been enhanced by over-the-top synthesiser noises. It all speaks of less-than-talented film-makers trying to make something halfway-professional looking, but falling some way short of succeeding.

Most of the budget, I'll warrant, went on hiring three porn stars to play the princesses: Nikki Love (also in Barely Legal All Stars 1), Ada Mae Johnson (star of Anal Haven) and Hanna Harper (check her out in Big Wet Tits 4; you probably need to see Big Wet Tits 1-3 first, though, otherwise you might not understand the plot). Ms Johnson is cute. The other two are the usual pneumatic types you find in bog-standard American porn (who'd have thought they had silicone implants in Ancient Egypt?) They're rubbish at dancing, which is unfortunate, as the plot relies on their dancing being brilliant enough to revive the fortunes of a failing strip club.

The rest of the cast are uniformly ugly. The three brothers are hideous, especially the skinny one, who looks like Tom Petty's seedy brother. Most of the cast haven't appeared in anything else, and several use pseudonyms. All the Egyptians have strong American accents (or, in one case, an English one). Not only was this obviously not filmed anywhere near Egypt (the closest we get are some still images of famous landmarks) but it wasn't filmed anywhere near Hollywood either.

Still, the Egyptian scenes are almost funny. The terrible pastiche classical music is hilarious (I guess they must have thought 'olden days = classical music'). And the dialogue, much of which concerns nipple sucking, is just about stupid enough to raise a smile (references to 'Hades' and 'the king' show how much attention is being paid to period detail here).

When it moves to the present day the low-budget will start to really piss you off, though. Watching endless scenes in the strip joint is boring as hell, and the music isn't good enough to provide a saving grace (as it so often is in older films of this type like, say, Mantis In Lace). It isn't a long film, but it is deathly dull.

It's so dumb - three Ancient Egyptian princesses, from Biblical times, having been reborn in a world of cars and electricity, launch straight into a career working in the cheapest looking strip joint you've ever seen. There's a painful scene in which their boyfriends try to explain television to them (the set conveniently only showing public domain films, including The House on Haunted Hill. And why are all five of them in bed together in the same hotel room? Ew...) There's an odd scene involving a drug dealer, which looks like a misconceived attempt to throw some gritty, Abel Ferrara-style weirdness into the mix. And the dialogue throughout is, um, uninspired ("Most women would love to have big, bouncing, beautiful breasts like that!")

And then there's the mummy aspect of things, which is what made me watch this in the first place. The film throws in plenty of references to old mummy flicks, but nothing can prepare you for the shoddiness of the mummy costume. There's something *almost* endearing about a scene in which an amateurish mummy strangles a visibly bored woman in a bathtub, but even the modest gore effects the film tries for are pathetic. The one bit that made me laugh was the big confrontation scene, in which mummy and princesses face off against each other. They've obviously just asked the three porn actresses to improvise some martial arts moves, which works as well as you'd expect.

There's loads of full frontal nudity from the ladies. There are no sex scenes at all, though, probably because the cast seem barely able to remember their lines, let alone act. I suspect this will have an 18 certificate if anyone ever tries to release it here, but in all honesty I don't think there's anything seriously contentious, apart from the crass stupidity of the plot and the ineptness of its execution.

This is an absolute stinker, and if I'd actually paid for it I'd be furious. The chances of anyone stumbling across this by accident are negligible, but unless the sight of naked ladies is something that you think is worthwhile in itself, then you should steer clear. I wouldn't even have liked this when I was 14.

Ah well, back to Finnegans Wake.

Summary: A terrible softcore romp