Friday, March 6, 2015

Mummy Raider (2002)

... aka: Erotic Raider
... aka: Misty Mundae: Erotic Raider
... aka: Misty Mundae: Mummy Raider

Directed by:
Brian Paulin

"Vat?! You've never been kissed by a Nazi bevore?!"

Somewhere in Berlin, evil German Dr. Humboldt ("Esmeralda DeLarocca" / Ruby Larocca in a bad blonde wig) is intent on reviving "The Fourth Reich" so she has a mummy stolen from Egypt and famous archaeologist Professor Cleve (Bruce G. Hallenbeck) as well as his daughter Kristen (Darian Caine) kidnapped and brought to her headquarters. Supposedly Kristen knows all of the secrets of life and death and is in possession of a special bracelet that can bring the dead back to life. Dr. Humboldt threatens to rape her with a billy club until she agrees to revive the mummy using her power. However, Kristen's lover Misty (Misty Mundae) aka "the Mummy Raider" is one step ahead of everyone, breaks into the villain's lair clad in a skimpy black leather ensemble, strips off her top and gets to work blasting all the bad guys. After her work is done, she sends the professor on his way so she can spend some girl time with Kristen. When they're finished, they decide to cure the Nazi doctor and "bring her back from the dark side" with some more lesbian sex.









This is pretty pathetic even by Seduction Cinema's low standards. Though ultimately made for the same purpose, I've always felt there should be a certain divide between soft and hard core porn in terms of the acting, story, production values, etc. That divide has all but vanished since the home video market dried up years ago, but that's another discussion for another day. What we basically have here is a softie with the budget and quality of a homemade shot-on-video hardcore flick. The story is bare bones and stupid, it was shot with a camcorder and the evil doctor's headquarters are clearly just someone's garage. The amount of effort put into trying to make this a good or entertaining film is evident when you notice they didn't even bother trying to remove ladders and tools hanging up on the walls or even cover the garage door! The mummy is covered with ripped up burlap sacks and toilet paper and its sarcophagus is a wooden box with "Egypt" stenciled on the side with a door lying on top for the lid complete with clear shots of where the hinges were removed. You either care about making a good movie or you don't, regardless of genre, and it couldn't be more clear what category the people who made this fall into.









Of course one could forgive the nonexistent production values and pretty much everything else (to an extent) had this at least delivered on the sex but - surprise! - it even fails at that. One prolonged sex scene and three different girls in a cheap home movie running 40 minutes (much of which is comprised of credits and repeated footage) doesn't really cut it when you can watch movies of this same type that are shot on film, made with some basic skill and feature double or triple the amount of babes showing some skin.

8 comments:

  1. I think at that time, Mundae's name in the film was enough. They could spend very little and still use their "star" to make a little money. That and numerous lesbian scenes. I really like Mundae for obvious reasons, but she can be used well in the right parts. She has never really escaped her low budget roots, and sadly she could find work in Cinemax (however this channel is moving away from their sex shows so prevalent in the past) series softcore.

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  2. Haven't seen anything new with Misty in a long time now. Once she got away from Seduction Cinema I remember she tried to reinvent herself as "Erin Brown" and did a bunch of horror films. That started promisingly with "Masters of Horror" and a few medium budget films but it quickly went downhill from there to a bunch of REALLY low grade stuff. Shame cause she did / does have some promise.

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  3. I think like all actresses, you have this small window and the offers for parts come and then sadly stop. Even horror on a low budget scale can often dissipate if you are asking for a certain amount to perform. Unfortunate, her reinvention just couldn't quite result in dividends.

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  4. Yeah, if you can't break through in the mainstream it is VERY difficult to get by on what you make through B films. Even people who've been at it for decades and made a name for themselves in low budget films have a hard time scraping by!

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  5. An odd outlier in Brian Paulin's filmography given that all of his other films have been crazy, dark, gore-filled and mostly supernatural ones, making this seem like some kind of weird gag.

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  6. This is still the only film of his I've seen. Any others worth checking out?

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  7. Well, they tend to be high on ambition and imagination and sometimes atmosphere, but held back by a lack of coherency/sense and production values (outside of the gore and creature effects). Cryptic Plasm, Fetus, and maybe Bone Sickness are probably his "main" and most approachable (relatively speaking) films.

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  8. I found Cryptic Plasm up on Youtube so I bookmarked it. Seems a good place to start and if I like that I will continue. Thanks!

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