tek's rating:

Under Wraps, on Disney Channel
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This first aired in 1997, but I feel fairly certain that I didn't see it until at least a few years later, probably. (So that would have been the early 2000s, possibly before I started writing reviews.) I'm writing this review in 2017, after watching the movie on DVD. It was pretty ridiculous, but I liked it more than I expected to.

It begins with a monster movie, which a couple of 12-year-old kids named Marshall and Gilbert are watching in a theater. (Gilbert is played by Adam Wylie, who was familiar to me from Picket Fences.) Marshall is a big horror movie fan (we'll later see that his bedroom has hardly any space that isn't filled with memorabilia), but Gilbert is scared of practically everything, and leaves the movie early. After the movie is over, Marshall joins Gilbert, and while talking on the walk home, he learns that Gilbert has been delivering newspapers to a creepy man named Mr. Kubat and has been too scared to collect payment for the past two years. So he insists they go to the man's house (even though it's kind of late at night; I would have at least waited til morning) to collect payment. But that doesn't happen, because Kubat has a dog that scares them both away. A couple days later, at school, their friend Amy (Clara Bryant, who would later star in Tru Confessions) tells them that Kubat had died, and that her mom, a realtor, is selling his house. Amy and Marshall convince Gilbert to go with them to check out the house that night, and while breaking into the basement, they inadvertently knock over an Egyptian sarcophagus, which allows the lid to open part way. When the moonlight shines onto the hand of the mummy within, it awakens. The kids don't realize this at first, but when they go back to look for Gilbert's lost glasses, the mummy chases them... and then returns the glasses. So they come to realize the mummy is friendly and lonely. (He can only grunt, but Marshall later claims to understand what he's saying. And occasionally, when he says very simple things, it's obvious what his grunts mean.) They eventually end up naming the mummy "Harold."

Meanwhile, Marshall's mother (Corinne Bohrer), is divorced, and dating a man named Ted (Bill Fagerbakke, who also plays Harold). Marshall isn't happy about the relationship, even though he thinks Ted is a nice guy. He just doesn't want his dad to be replaced by anyone. (I found it rather ironic that he ends up becoming so attached to Harold, considering it's the same actor, albeit completely unrecognizable.) Anyway, Marshall takes Gilbert and Amy to meet a friend of his named Bruce, who runs the horror memorabilia shop where Marshall gets all his stuff. They ask him what he knows about mummies, and he reads a myth from a book that talks about how a mummy can be reawakened, by the light of a full moon around the time of some kind of festival of the dead, or whatever. And as it happens, it's currently a few days until Halloween (which isn't technically the time of year the book was talking about, I don't think, but since it's the same idea, it works the same way). And the book says that if the mummy doesn't return to its sarcophagus by midnight of that holiday, it will turn to dust. Of course the kids don't tell Bruce about Harold (yet). But they have a problem, because the day after they met Harold, all the stuff from the basement, including the sarcophagus, had disappeared. So... I'm probably forgetting the order in which some things happened. But Harold was wandering around town, so they had to track him down. And then they also have to find out what happened to his sarcophagus.

And... I guess I'll leave out any more details, to avoid spoilers. But I did think it was kind of funny. I will say I thought a couple of Amy's jokes were mildly risqué for her age (and the movie's target audience). And occasionally her snarkiness could veer into just plain meanness. But for the most part I thought she was probably the best character in the movie.

In 2021 there was a remake.


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