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I Was A Teenage Mummy
[Ghost Limb]
1992; b&w
Directed by Christopher Frieri
Starring: Chris Tsakis, Ahmed Ben "Leo" Kalib, Mark Fucile, Janice K. Johnson, Gerard J. Schneider, Elizabeth Lee Miller, Lora Zuckerman, Frank Pensabene, Robert Reiss & Joan Devitt
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I Was A Teenage Mummy looks and feels like it was made a zillion years ago, and in a way it was. Although, realistically, the early '90s only feels like a zillion years ago. But despite this being made in 1992, this film definitely has all the markings of a 1952 teensploitation / drive-in horror flick, filtered through a lens coated in a thin layer of New York City grime; and, needless to say, we love that. The first characters we meet are a trio of high school aged juvenile delinquents. (You know the type - cuffed jeans, leather jackets, hair grease, etc.) When not smoking, holding up walls or talking in a mixture of '50s slang and Shakespeare-esque dialogue, they pass the time hassling other kids at school. First they set upon a somewhat kooky foreign exchange student in the bathroom. They rough him up and flush a toilet while his head is in it before leaving him crying on the floor. After next period, while loitering in the hallway, they decide to hassle a pretty female student. She verbally puts them in their place before smacking one of them upside the head with her stack of books and moving on. Much to the delight of the foreign exchange student who we see lurking in the shadows. After witnessing this tete-a-tete, he starts spouting mumbo jumbo about "the prophecy" and fondling the wall. Shortly after, we see him lurking in some other, outdoor, shadows spouting yet more mumbo jumbo and fondling what appears to be a brain and some thick wet string (I think it's supposed to look like entrails or something) while the student he admired earlier walks by. He lights up an effigy of some sort and crawls out of the bushes, putting his hand over the girl's mouth and, after she faints, putting her over his shoulder and running off. Once he's got the girl laid out on a table in a dark room somewhere, he talks some more nonsense, working himself into a frenzy, and culminating in him dry humping her until she becomes a mummy. (Yeah, I'm not a hundred percent sure how one leads to the other either but hey, if we can believe that Jason Vorhees can be reanimated by a bolt of lightning, I suppose we can believe that some Egyptian teenager can come in his pants and make a girl turn into a zombie.) At that point the two become one vengeful unit and set out on their shared mission - to kill everyone and anyone who wronged them in the past. And they're pretty damn successful at it until the resident bumbling private dick saves the day. In between all of that we get more scenes of teenagers smoking, jive talking, making out and dying, plus we're treating to a couple of live numbers from the A-Bones, who also provide the movie's soundtrack. (Available in CD form on A-Bones' Billy Miller & Miriam Linna's label, Norton Records.) There are two other features on this DVD as well, The Orbitrons and Hot Rod Hearse. The Orbitrons I'd actually seen a couple years ago when I was sent a review copy from Candy For Bad Children and I enjoyed that quite a bit. (If you're so inclined, you can read the review here.) The Kommandant & I watched Hot Rod Hearse after taking in the main feature; then we went back and watched parts of it again and tried to figure out what the hell we had just seen. Still haven't quite figured it out but I gather it has something to do with a band who gets abducted by an alien being, or perhaps beings, in the form of a hot rod hearse. And then, of course, wacky hijinks ensue. Was the movie too high for us, or were we not high enough for it? The world may never know. Overall a very entertaining package.
—Bunny
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