I have to admit that I am a closet fan of the Mummy remake from the 90s with Brendan Fraser. It was one of the few post-Indiana Jones movies that actually recaptured a little bit of that same fun (I would argue that the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie was also pretty snazzy in that regard). Adventure movies are hard to come by. It was, by no means, a horror movie.
Sitting down to watch the original Mummy from 1932 with Boris Karloff for the first time, I was shocked by how much of the basic plot was identical in the 1999 remake. Besides adding in a bunch of chases and special effects, the story is that of Imhotep, a priest buried alive for the crime of loving the daughter of the Pharaoh. He wakes up in the 1930s and seeks out both the soul and the body of his lost love. There is a hero and a female protagonist who happens to have the soul of Imhotep's love. There are a couple of supporting players who don't make it all the way through the movie. Whereas the remake parlays every plot development into an action set piece, the original is truly a horror movie (laced with tragedy). Karloff is great at portraying the yearning desire of Imhotep. "No man has suffered for a woman as I have suffered for you," he says with the weight of 3000 years behind his words...and you believe him. He can't vomit sandstorms or control flesh eating scarabs but Karloff has the power of dark arts and ancient curses on his side. At a little over an hour, this movie moves quickly and never really slows down. I would recommend it to horror fans who don't need gore or special effects.
Gravity, on the other hand, is nothing but special effects...and it is pretty breathtaking. I know, you are asking how this is horror. If movies like Frozen (three kids stuck on a chair lift) and Open Water (a couple stranded in the middle of the ocean) count as horror, I don't see why Gravity wouldn't. Two astronauts find themselves with no obvious way home after a satellite is destroyed, creating a chain reaction of debris that is whipping around the Earth at 20,000 miles per hour. Like the sharks in Open Water or the Wolves in Frozen, the debris field is a recurring threat that you dread to see coming.
Clooney gets the better role as the experienced astronaut on his last mission. He knows how to handle pretty much anything and can size up a situation very quickly. He is also charming because...Clooney. Bullock has the thankless task of being the newb on her first mission having to deal with seemingly insurmountable obstacles between her and a return to Earth. I have read some reviews that say Bullock can't really carry all the emotional weight that is placed on her in the movie but I think her acting is fine. The dialogue is so damn cheesy at times that there is no way to deliver it where you come off sounding believable.
The person I saw it with wasn't really that impressed but I enjoyed the movie, overall. I was clenching my jaws the entire film. As the pair leap frog from one ruined vessel to another, their chances of missing a handhold and just drifting off into the void get higher and higher. The central metaphor of the movie is also one I am very in tuned with right now. When you are adrift and things seem hopeless, how do you go on? I thought the movie had some decent things to say about this but this is one of those rare times I wanted a little more ambiguity. There are several moments in the final sequence where the film could have just cut to black. Yes, the mainstream audience would have been angry but I think the point of the movie would have been better made. Regardless, Cuaron has crafted a cool thrill ride with some horrible dialogue. I saw this in 3-D Imax and that was totally worth it.
Finally, I watched a video a co-worker let me borrow called "The Chair." It is a low budget horror movie from 2006. Directed by the editor of Ginger Snaps (and the director of Ginger Snaps 2), I have to admit this had a decent enough premise. A girl moves into a sublet old house to work on her Psychology thesis. She has had mental issues in the past. She starts being pretty aggressively haunted and then possessed by a convoluted back story. The execution is somewhat...ok, very...lacking. The acting is subpar, the script goes into at least one completely unneeded twist (did her professor's identity even matter?), the titular chair makes no sense and the decisions made by everyone in the last ten minutes are just really stupid. The guy I borrowed this from likes to pick apart horror movies and tell how he would do them differently. I can't imagine how he likes this movie. So, yeah, not really worth watching but I could totally see a competent remake of this.
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