The Mummy

Updated June 26, 2020 | Infoplease Staff

Three thousand years ago Imhotep slept with the pharaoh's mistress. In the 1920s a team of bumbling Americans explorers ignore the hieroglyphic warnings (as they always do) and unleash a stream of plagues on Egypt. Imhotep wakes up angry and lovesick.

Enter Brendan Fraser as a Foreign Legioner who steals scenes and dialogue from Indiana Jones only to drop them, clumsily, on the desert floor. His sidekick is as a librarian-cum-Egyptologist (Rachel Weisz) with a sincere longing to find the fabled City of the Dead and an unhealthy knack for attracting the new and improved Imhotep. It's a spoofy B-movie supercharged on computer-generated effects, with Fraser's rubbery good looks and goofy action fated to save the day.

The Mummy plagiarizes, stumbles, emits groaning jokes, and depicts Arabs with typical Hollywood antipathy. Then along come locust swarms, swirling sandstorms, legions of undead, and horrifying scarab beetles that imbed themselves in human flesh.