This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Natalie Grace in a scene from "Lee Cronin's The Mummy." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

Led by “Sinners,” “Weapons” and “Keeper,” 2025 was a landmark year for the horror genre as the best films were original and scary. However, those two qualities cannot be found in “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” an easy contender for the worst film of 2026.

In this reimagining of the classic monster mash, Charlie and Larissa, a reporter and a nurse (played by Jack Reynor and Leia Costa) are living in Cairo when Katie their daughter (played by Emily Mitchell) has gone missing. Eight years later, Katie (played by Natalie Grace as a teen) is found alive and living in a sarcophagus. Soon the audience learns Katie’s appearance and inability to speak are not entirely due to her years of captivity, as she is also possessed by the spirit of an evil mummy.

The best thing about “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is that the title informs us who to blame for this fiasco. In this case, it is the writer and director Cronin, who was responsible for the just-OK “Evil Dead Rise” (2023) and followed up that surprise hit with this.

Cronin borrows heavily from “The Exorcist” (1973), “The Evil Dead” (1981) and especially “The Exorcist: Believer” (2023), which has an identical first act of a little girl being abducted and her family’s struggles to start over after she’s found. Both films fall apart after an hour, though this one is far more enthusiastic about vividly depicting the mutilation of a small child, an exploitative exercise in making the characters and the audience suffer.

Numerous idiotic plot points pile up, like the random appearance of obviously CGI devil dogs right out of “The Omen” and the way this ancient supernatural evil from Egypt not only speaks English but talks like a villain in a horror movie.

Reynor’s character eventually loses focus. The characters are one-dimensional, and the film gives us no one to root for. Costa at least gets Ellen Burstyn’s “Exorcist” haircut, but she still plays a mom whose decisions defy all logic.

The scene where another possessed child merrily tells off her schoolteacher in class using a word I’ve never heard a child utter outside of “South Park” seemed to be the irredeemable low point.

But Cronin manages to top it with a nonsensical, vile sequence in which a videocassette reveals a ritual where a terrified child was tortured by a group of masked adults. In light of the unthinkable reports from the Jeffrey Epstein files, this might be the worst time for the filmmaker to present imagery this foul in the name of entertainment. In terms of plot logic, I have no idea why the videotape exists or how anyone in this movie even has a VCR.

Horror is not a polite genre but, like bad stand-up comedy or a pop song with self-consciously provocative lyrics, you can tell when someone is trying too hard to shock. There is a desperation to Cronin’s film, which at one point resorts to the possessed little girl hungrily licking vomit off the ground. Is “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” intended to be a parody or dark comedy? Not at all. The tone is deadly serious from start to finish.

Having recently revisited William Friedkin’s original “The Exorcist,” which has never been topped but is ripped off at least once a year, I was struck by how the film’s reputation doesn’t match the film. Yes, it maintains a notorious ability to jolt, but it’s also a compassionate film about the power of faith and the strength of a mother’s love; the ending isn’t just upbeat, it celebrates its characters and their survival, with no set up for a sequel.

Here, you can tell exactly where the “additional filming” took place after a reportedly bad test screening, though the film hypocritically concludes without showing the same sickening death ritual that was earlier shown. Have I mentioned how much I hate this movie?

(0 out of 4 stars)

Barry Wurst II is the founder of the Hawaii Film Critics Society and teaches film classes at University of Hawaii Maui College.