Notes: Reissued
by Film Ventures International, 1991.
Also Mystery Science Theatre 3000 show #405
(1992).
Doug McAdden: Ben Murphy
Suzy: Nina Axelrod
With Kevin Brophy, Robert Random, James Karen,
Sam Chew, Jr., Melissa Prophet, Austin Stoker, Gerard Prendergast,
Shari Belafonte-Harper.
Executive Producer: Robert A. Shaheen
Produced: Dimitri Villard and Jason Williams
Directed: Tom Kennedy
Story: Jason Williams and Tom Friedman
Screenplay: Tom Friedman and Karen Levitt
Music: Richard H. Band.
Summary:
In what the MST3K people call "a cinematic tranquilizer,"
Doug McAdden, professor at the California Institute of Sciences,
discovers a 3000-year-old sarcophagus apparently in a lost passage
of King Tut's tomb. Back home he opens it with the help of his
students. One of them, Pete, accidentally overradiates the mummy.
Prof. Doug finds odd the signs of "hasty burial, minimal
preparation." The mummy retains its internal organs. Pete
later steals five crystals from a secret compartment in the sarcophagus.
At the press conference, another student touches
some green goo ("guacamummy," says Tom Servo), the mummy
is gone, and a janitor soon dies. The crystals have been dispersed
as payment and gifts, and throb and glow occasionally when they
are about to be retrieved by the mummy.
Institute administration attributes the lost
mummy to a student prank, but students keep dying or being hospitalized.
Doug's theory is that Tutenkhamen's soldiers discovered a stranger
in the desert. Tut visited, was sorely burned by an extraterrestrial
fungus which consumed his flesh but to which the alien visitor
was immuned, and died. The strange traveller was weak already
and easy to entomb hastily, but the soldiers also died horribly
around the sarcophagus, as earlier discovered. When Doug's very
special friend and grad student Suzy notices a pattern projected
by light refracted through the gem on her bracelet, a search for
the remaining crystals yields Doug's discovery in a boiler room
of what the MST3K people call a "travel Yahtzee" doohickey,
onto which the crystals have been arranged. As administrators
converge on the scene, the mummy shows up with the final crystal
and turns into a rejuvenated alien. A cop tries to shoot it but
hits Doug, who reaches the hand of the alien in time to be beamed
into disappearance with him. The sleaziest administrator touches
a remaining crystal and screams as his hand is immediately covered
with the green slimy fungus.
Commentary:
The "Bots" are particularly hilarious when they translate
hieroglyphics which various characters silently keep viewing in
poorly lit rooms: "Dear Aunt Nefertiti; thanks for the socks."
As for the film, well. The deflection of mummy
into alien belies further inability to make the monster in its
pure form work as a creature of horror.