Vamp or Not? 7 Mummies

Once again Zone Horror runs to my rescue and allows me to watch a movie without having to purchase the DVD for, surely, to have bought this specifically would have made me weep – which kinda shows my opinion of the film.

This is a sub-From Dusk Till Dawn and, just to hammer the point home, has a cameo from Danny Trejo as a character called Apache. Just to note know that I know most of the character names by tying in the actors from the imdb page – nothing so simple in the movie as letting us know most of the character names.

Story wise there isn’t much to say. We start with a couple of gold prospector types dragging a coffin across the dessert. The bottom splits and gold pours out. A rider approaches and cuts them down with a sword.

Cut forward and a prison truck overturns and the prisoners are free. They kill the male guard and take the female guard, Lacy (Cerina Vincent), hostage. They set off across the desert, led by bad dude Rock (Matt Schulze), and find a medallion. After one of their number leaves on his own path they find a house owned by the aforementioned Apache. He tells them of the lost gold, mined by (evil) Jesuits using Native American slave labour, that the medallion can give access to. The gold is in one direction the Mexican border the other.

They get to the town where the gold is and it looks like a scene from the old West, though later we see some bikers as well. It seems that some dude, whom imdb tells us is named Drake (Billy Drago), is in charge. They go to the saloon, where the first and last drink is always free. Some of the convicts go off with whores. Sun goes down and all the patrons become undead attacking the convicts.

Eventually a few of them get to the gold where the Mummies of the Jesuits come alive and they are kung fu experts – of course they are. Eventually the nice convict, Travis (Billy Wirth), and Lacy escape. Then we see the coffin drag again….

Glib, yes, but to put more detail in would be a waste of time and effort as the writers obviously didn’t put much thought into the script themselves. I haven’t gone into characters too much as the characters are so flat it is untrue with no character development at all. However, is it vampire…

Obviously the mummies are not vampires, though Drake does turn into a mummy and then gets dissolved in the sun at the end (mixing myths much). The characters we are looking at here are the tavern folk. Most look zombieish, though during the day they seem human. Indeed most are referred to in the credits as ghouls.

The ones we are specifically looking at are the saloon whores, who are called vampires in the credits. However they do not have fangs. They are flesheaters (though some vampire myths show vamps as flesheaters) rather than blood drinkers. They were around during the day and, as they are protecting Jesuit gold, one assumes they are not susceptible to the powers of religious icons. On the other hand they are susceptible, it seems, to gun shot – not a generally vampiric trait.

This is one where, despite the fact that these creatures are listed as vampires, I’m going to go for Not Vamp. As for the film itself, the only good thing I can say is it was better than the risible From Dusk Till Dawn rip-off “Legion of the Dead” - just.

The imdb page is here.