8. A Film Made After 1989 that Features a Mummy, but not Brendan Fraser or Tom Cruise

A multinational expedition discovers a lost city beneath a pyramid and the reawakened gods of ancient Egypt want to end the world. John Rhys-Davies plays Professor Hayden Masterson, the academic who believes that every 5,000 years a celestial event happens and that it’s connected to the pyramids of Egypt. He’s also way too driven, so he needs some balance from his co-adventurer Doug Adler (David Charvet). So yes, we have someone known for being on treasure hunts from the Indiana Jones movies and someone known for being around sand from Baywatch.

Joss Ackland also ends up being in this, as well as a psychic named Claire (Emily Holmes), Carmen Chaplin as Masterson’s daughter and Michael Higgins as Peter Levitz, who blackmailed his way into this quest. There’s also a dude named Adam Prime (Nick Moran) who is not a robot nor made in a lab with a sobriquet like that.

The effects look kind of good, the lasers are cool but this was made in 2006 and sat for seven years, which is never a good thing. What else? Well, Uwe Boll co-produced it. It’s directed by Roger Christian, who in addition to making The Sender also directed Arcadia’s video for “Election Day.” It was written by Peter Atkins (Wishmaster, Hellraiser II: Hellbound) and Anthony Hickox, who directed Waxwork.

That said, this was also known as Dawn of the Mummy and there’s a rumor that it was a remake of a more famous movie with that title, the video nasty Dawn of the Mummy. I think that’s just wishful thinking, as while both of those movies are kind of boring in parts, at least the 1981 mummy movie has Fulci-like shambling gore driven tomb dwellers.

7. An Action Film That’s Secretly A Horror FIlm.

Russian-Kazakh Timur Bekmambetov started as a production designer before making Peshavar Waltz and a remake of The Arena for Roger Corman. He may be best-known in the U.S. for his movies Wanted, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and his Screenlife movies Unfriended, Searching and Profile. He’s also the owner of Walt Disney’s Los Angeles mansion.

For geeks like me, well, he’s known for this movie, a Russian horror superhero action movie based on the 1998 novel The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. The concept — the armies of light and dark ended a battle when the two leaders, Geser and Zavulon, called a truce and each side commissioned a quasi-police force to ensure it was kept with the Light called the Night Watch and the Dark the Day Watch — gets out of the way quickly so Bekmambetov can do what he loves: absolutely berserk action that goes way too far in the best of ways.

Anton Gorodetsky (Konstantin Khabensky) is a member of the Night Watch. He got there when he was caught paying a witch to cast a spell to bring back his wife at the cost of her unborn child which was not his. He was able to see the Watch members who came to stop this and is one of the Others and he must stop a prophecy that claims that the world will soon end when the Light and the Dark go to war for the final time.

There are six books in the series, but after the sequel Day Watch, Bekmambetov decided to not finish the planned trilogy. Lukyanenko’s books are very anti-Ukrainian and none of that is in the movie. This was controversial as an underground nonconformist intellectual movement named Padonki said that it was too Hollywood and had no ideas. They called it Night Shame.

What is a shame is that this movie was a big deal in 2004 and no one talks about it today. I mean, it has possessed baby dolls used as soldiers! Cars flip all over the place! Watch it!

6. A Horror Film That Takes Place In One Room (No CUBEs)

Eight people — Em (Emily Foxler), Kevin (Maury Sterling), Mike (Nicholas Brendon), Lee (Lorene Scafaria), Hugh (Hugo Armstrong), Beth (Elizabeth Gracen), Amir (Alex Manugian) and Laurie (Lauren Maher) — gather for a dinner part on the night Miller’s Comet passes. Em and Kevin are dating but she’s unsure. Amir has brought Laurie, who used to date Kevin. Beth and Laurie hate one another, yet Laurie is being really tough on Em.

Then things get really weird.

As the lights go out in the entire neighborhood, they realize that everyone in their dining room has exact duplicates in another dining room one house over. Basically, the movie takes place all inside one house, along with another house that has another group of eight people.

Did I say one house? By the end of this movie, every choice has made another reality and some of those are bleeding into one another.

Directed and written by James Ward Byrkit from a story by Manugian, this movie didn’t have a script as much as getting their own unique paragraph which had their goal for the day. This allowed for the story to unfold naturally as the movie shot over five days, which is why so many of the reactions seem so real. Manugian also was on set as Amir to guide any scenes that went too far off the story.

I have to go back and watch this again, as Wikipedia reports that the movie “…cuts to black at 0:02, 0:03, 0:05, 0:05, 0:07, 0:09, 0:19, 0:27, 0:32, 0:34, 1:06, 1:18, 1:22, and 1:23.” Bykirt says that there’s a meaning there but won’t say what it is. He also said that this movie was an attempt “to strip down a film set to the bare minimum: getting rid of the script, getting rid of the crew.”

This movie should be discussed way more than it is and I can’t believe that it took me so long to find it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

5. A Horror Film Directed by a Fine Artist.

Cynthia Sherman is a fine artist whose work is mainly a series of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. Her best-regarded work is the collected “Untitled Film Stills”, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself playing the female roles of arthouse films and exploitation films.

Working from a script that she wrote with Elise MacAdam, Todd Haynes and Tom Kalin, Sherman made Office Killer, a movie in which Dorine Douglas (Carol Kane) goes from taking the corpse of her friend Gary Michaels (David Thornton) after he accidentally gets electrocuted to going on a murder spree that includes artistic murders of Girl Scout, the office manager Norah Reed (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and Reed’s lover Daniel Birch (Michael Imperioli). By the end, she’s on the road, a severed head in the passenger seat, looking for another office job.

Plus, Molly Ringwald works in the same office and Eric Bogosian appears in dreams as Dorine’s father.

This movie isn’t sure what it wants to be. Does it want to play the violence off-screen or shove your face in it? Is it a parody of slashers or just a bad one? It’s hard to tell. It reminds me of why I don’t really like C.H.U.D. because it seems like everyone in it is above being in a horror movie. I do like that the art for it tries to make it look like a 90s erotic office thriller, which it is not.

DAY 4: A Horror Film Released by SRS Cinema.

Directed by Anthony and Mark Polonia from a script by Mark and Aaron Drake, this movie takes place in Shadyville, which has a new resident, the House Squatch, which is, well, squatting in a home that’s for sale. That means that a real estate firm is going to use their money-based power to strong arm the police into sending the creature back to where he came.

Just so you know, Pennsylvania contains multitudes. So while this and Suburban Sasquatch were both shot in my home state, Wellsboro and West Chester are 194 miles apart. Somehow, both of these movies have a Bigfoot that has interdimensional powers that operates in the non-urban neighborhoods of the Keystone State.

So we end up with a sheriff (Ken Van Sant) and a Sasquatch hunter (Jeff Kirkendall) searching the cul de sacs of a small town hunting for the hairy ape that is bedeviling them all. Hopefully that laser gun will come in handy.

The Polonias said that this movie was “the first in our series of “House” meets “Monster” themed movies follow our hugely successful House Shark.” I can’t wait to see what weirdness they figure out next.

You can get this from SRS or watch it on Tubi.

DAY 3: An Egyptian Horror Film.

Ahlam hakekya is an Egyptian film that takes one of the best giallo plots for its story: Mariam (Hanan Turk) is a painter married to Ahmed (Khaled Saleh) but her life is filled with strangeness, as every night she dreams of the car accident that took the lives of her daughter and first husband. Of course, as you can expect from a movie inspired by giallo, she also starts dreaming of murdering people and when she wakes up, those same people have died the same way as her sleeping visions.

The police get involved and suspect Mariam’s best friend Maay, which raises the question if Mariam is also part of the crimes or if she’s somehow connected to Maay within the world of dreams. This all makes Marian go female giallo crazy and decide that she’s never going to sleep again.

Ask Nancy Thompson how well that works.

Director Mohamed Gomaa also worked on the TV series Qariat El Fingan in which a fortune telling app’s prophecies start coming true. Real Dreams was written by Mohamed Diab, who directed four episodes of Marvel’s Moon Knight series.