What the hell did I just watch? I mean, I see a lot of outrageously silly horror flicks, but there's a special kind of insanity that runs throughout 7 Mummies -- and I don't mean the good kind.

We open with two greedy gravediggers who get sliced up by an unseen presence before delving into the 5-minute credits sequence. Then we witness a tipped-over van, out of which fall a collection of slimy convicts and one extra-jiggly female guard. The group promptly decides to wander off into a surprisingly verdant desert wasteland, whereupon they come across a mumbling Danny Trejo. Vulgarities are exchanged, and then the convict crew (and busty broad) wanders off into the desert again, only to arrive at an authentic-style Old West town, complete with booze, whores, and (you guessed it) a bunch of lame-looking zombies who pop out once the sun goes down.

And then it's just a bunch of aimless meandering and tons of insipid dialogue before the flick winds down with an amusingly inept finale. A movie that wanted to be a From Dusk Till Dawn-style genre stew is, instead, a painfully inert, agressively silly, and absolutely dreary concoction. It's a dumb story populated by obnoxious characters who do moronic things. Often.

First-time director Nick Quested makes all sorts of embarrassing mistakes: He allows his annoyingly incongruous rock & rap tunes to simply blare over the dialogue, the lighting on the flick is consistently insufficient, and there's way too many redundant (not to mention pointless) fade-ins, fade-overs, and stutter-step editing gimmicks. And don't even get me started on the horrific screenplay.

B-movie fanatics will no doubt see a cast list that includes Cerina Vincent, Danny Trejo, Martin Kove, and Billy Drago, and get a few charitable thoughts in their head. Ignore those feelings and simply rent something else. Trust me.

The DVD

Video: The anamorphic widescreen (1.78:1) transfer is, frankly, probably a lot slicker than the movie deserves. Had the flick been shot with a few extra lighting rigs, the transfer might actually mean something.

Audio: Dolby Digital 5.1, which (oddly enough) seems to drop a level or two when the (too few) action sequences arrive. Weird.

Extras: Just the 7 Mummies trailer and a 29-minute featurette entitled The Making of 7 Mummies: On Location, which is actually a fairly nifty look at low-budget on-location production, and is definitely more entertaining than the movie itself.

Final Thoughts

Minus the opening & closing credits, 7 Mummies runs about 70 minutes, 64 of which are almost unbearably terrible. (Some of the exterior shots are pretty impressive, so there's the extra six minutes.)

Oh, and I only counted 3 mummies, max.