DVD REVIEW: MUMMY’S KISS, THE – SECOND DYNASTY

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STUDIO: Cinema Epoch
MSRP: $19.98
RATED: NR for boobies
RUNNING TIME: 84 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Commentary w/ dir. Don Glut and editor Dean McKendrick
• Making-of featurette
• Trailer
• Photo galleries

The Pitch

"It’s The Mummy on location in Porn Valley!"

The Humans

Christine Nguyen, Stacy Burke, Kylie Wyote.

The Nutshell

A bitter old maid tries to con an Egyptian goddess into granting her youth and vim, through the sucking of nubile souls. The soul-sucking is facilitated by a somewhat juicy mummy, who brings clothes-hating nymphs to a museum. There, our villain licks their breasts a lot and then turns them into love slaves in her ever-expanding harem. Only a plucky (er, perky?) reporter can save the day! (Nguyen, and am I the only one that thinks of Shadowrun when I see that surname?)

Or, no, wait… This is a man’s sexy dream. Only the perky reporter’s clodfooted boyfriend can save the day!

The Lowdown

This is something of a companion piece to my review of I Was A Teenage Movie Maker, which is a documentary about The Mummy’s Kiss‘ writer and director, Don Glut.

The basic gist is that Don Glut was an amateur filmmaker back when he was a kid. Now that he is all growed up, what’s he like? Well, first off he confronts me with the dubious honor of figuring out a way to review a porn movie. I can’t do it. It’s impossible to review porn, because porn is not art. It’s not even entertainment. It is just exactly what it facilitates: masturbation. (Note that there is a huge difference between sexually-aware art and porn.) How on Earth do you imagine I might review someone’s masturbation?

"Well, Dave, points for distance and cohesion, but I’m still creeped out that you’re whacking off to Mean Girls. I feel you could have challenged yourself more, and maybe experimented with angles and materials. Y’know?"

We have a whole genre of literature called "fantasy," but porn doesn’t fall into it. Fantasy is metaphor, exaggeration, romanticism, adventure… Porn contains none of those things. What pornographers call fantasy are the images that surround an emission, diurnal or nocturnal. That’s not fantasy; it’s just imagination.

So, what does a quick tour inside the current state of Don Glut’s imagination show us? Botched boob jobs, careless narrative, wretched acting, and dialogue sequences that exist only to pass the time until the next softcore cunnilingus. There’s a telling moment in the feature commentary in which Glut announces that a particular topless sequence wasn’t in the original script, but, while filming, he felt there needed to be another topless shot in there, to keep the energy level high.

The Mummy’s Kiss – Second Dynasty is a masturbation. I don’t mean that to be a flaming condemnation of the thing. It’s what it is, and it’s not really something that I am qualified to evaluate for anyone but myself. (NB: Did nothing for me.) It’s exactly the sort of film that a young man might want to emulate — with plagiarized "cool" story elements and a torrent of desperate testosterone — and I think that tells us a little something about Don Glut. Maybe he never stopped being a teenage movie maker.

The Package

Truly wretched audio and video work makes even watching the glacial sex scenes boring, if you can believe that. If you’ve ever been curious what DVD critics are talking about when we mention "artifacting," "pale blacks," "sibilance," or "non-anamorphic," then The Mummy’s Kiss – Second Dynasty is the sort of education you wish your fifth grade teacher would have shown during class.

You also get a slapdash "making-of" featurette, a trailer, some photo galleries, and an unintentionally hilarious commentary track. The track features Don Glut and his editor, Dean McKendrick, taking themselves entirely too seriously while forgetting the names of the bimbos they got to strip for them and taking some strange pride in doing no more research than visiting a museum and copying down names from exhibit plates.

What… I’m supposed to give this thing an objective score? It’s not even a movie. Let’s give this a shot:

1 out of 10