Under Wraps (1997) | Dir. Greg Beeman | 95 min.
Every day in October, a recommendation from John D’Amico of a horror movie or TV episode available for free on YouTube. Enjoy:
They can’t all be gruesome death-spirals, so kick back for a day with this kids’ TV movie about a bewildered mummy returned to life and the wiseass kids who have to get him back into his sarcophagus by midnight. It’s got it all—the big costume dance at the end, the spunky kid gang, the infinite loneliness of the mummy in love. The bad guy is played by Ed Lauter, veteran character actor who has turned up in everything from Hitchcock’s Family Plot to The Artist. This was a recommendation by fellow Smug Film contributor Brad Avery, who knows that the easiest way to my heart is mummies or Frankensteins or Draculas bumbling around confused in the modern world. It’s just a good formula. The tagline says “prepare to be spooked, creeped, and humored” which is oddly E. M. Forster-ish for the Disney Channel, but the spirit is there. Have a ball.