This is the second in a series of five pieces on “minor” horror films that I’m going to be publishing here weekly, throughout October. For more information, please see this post from two years ago, when I first did this. I’m scaling things back a bit this year due to having (more of) a life, etc., but the basic idea is the same.
The Mummy Theme Park (Alvaro Passeri, 2000)
Watching movies has been one of the central preoccupations of my life for a long time now. It’s something I’ve been doing in a serious, intentional, at times unhealthily obsessive way since I was eighteen, when (I’ve discussed this before, but permit the indulgence) a Cinema Studies course I signed up for when starting college, more or less on a whim, hooked me on the subject. That didn’t turn into a career, obviously, and today I have other preoccupations, chief among them my writing, which I have made a conscious effort to redirect much of that seriousness, that intentionality, that sometimes-unhealthy obsessiveness towards – but I have watched a lot of movies, is my point, and I still do watch a lot of movies, as well. Thousands and thousands, at this point, even counting features alone. And so it is something truly rare, today, for me to encounter a film, a commercial feature, no less, with a basic aesthetic logic, a basic raison d’être which is totally baffling and inscrutable to me, essentially unlike anything I have ever seen before. It is something which happens less and less often with every passing year. Some day, maybe, it will happen for the last time, and then there will be no more surprises left for me in the world of cinema. I sincerely hope not, I hope that I am not wrong to believe that the form’s scope exceeds that of my own brief life, but I know that cannot be sure, any more than I can be sure of the weather tomorrow. What I can say with certainty, though, is that this will not be a year which passes without such an occurrence. Because this year I watched The Mummy Theme Park.
