So it's come to this, has it? Remember when TV was really shit in the summer? (As opposed to being really shit all year round.) When the BBC considered those seaside variety specials prime entertainment? It's as though they just gave up. Cinema was the same. Gather the kids now and tell them how the weeks from June to August were a cinematic wasteland and they'll point and jeer at the funny old man in the wee-stained pants. Now, of course, it's what Hollywood wants. They fight for that scheduling, fisticuffs over the big American holidays. (Memorial Day anyone?) This is where coffers are filled. Launch any old dreck right (ah, Lost In Space) and you'll be raking it hand over fist before anyone does the math.

Thus, The Mummy. The last of the big Universal monsters not to have been effected-up. And, on this evidence, very much the least. Watch this and marvel at just how good Coppola's Dracula was. Sommers' film could almost - that's almost, mind - fool you in to thinking Branagh's rancid Frankenstein wasn't half as bad as it surely is.

Egypt, 1290 BC. Baldy high priest Imhotep is secretly knocking off royal totty Anck-su-Namun until Pharaoh Seti cottons on. So it's goodnight Seti. And goodnight Anck-su-Namun, trusting her big bad boyfriend has the power to raise her later. And then, wouldn't you know it, he's gone and got himself caught and buried alive at Hamunaptra, the City of The Dead. Doh.

1926. Young American adventurer Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) reluctantly returns to Hamunaptra, which he rediscovered three years previously, in the very English company of feckless wastrel Jonathan (John Hannah) and his mousy librarian sister Evelyn (Rachel Weisz). The three accidentally raise the undead Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), as you do, who pursues them back to Cairo in sure and certain knowledge that his dead love can be resurrected in Evelyn.

This is tedious stuff, blandly shoot, shoddily imagined and appallingly played by the majority of its principles. Weisz squeals unattractively and Hannah would be wildly out of step even in pantomime; both overact dreadfully. Even Kevin J. O'Connor (Gods And Monsters, Rudolph's graceful Equinox) gets nothing to do. Only Fraser brings anything to the part - a sort of Indiana Jones-Lite - but even he's asked to mug once to often. Clearly someone's got a franchise in mind.

And that there's an SFX budget no doubt stretching into the high gazillions helps not a jot. If a stop isn't soon put to dead-horse-flogging CGI effects an entire generation will grow up thinking movies always looked like bad action transfers lazily rubbed onto the back of a Weetabix carton - just like when we were kids. The flood of flesh-chewing beetles, sand storms cast in Imhotep's image and the skeletal mummy itself are unanimously awful, submerging any subtly beneath a high-tide of ill-conceived, pixillated flotsam. Being fantasy, Sommers' movie gets away with more (and they are not as cringe-makingly bad as Titanic, at least) but, really, it just will not do.

So there The Mummy stands in all its tattered, meagre glory. The few things that are good about it are stolen wholesale from Freund's original and even Terence Fisher's 1959 Hammer outing. It's a film so badly paced, badly written (it tosses in the Plagues of Egypt for no obvious reason, then promptly forgets about them) and badly directed (rumour is they're offering Sommers the next Jurassic Park gig - figures) that it sends you rushing back to the hits of previous summer seasons - The Fifth Element, Armageddon, Total Recall - with new found respect. So is it this year's Lost In Space? Absolutely, only even more dull and trailing the distinct whiff of racism about its crude ethnic stereotypes. And, like so many films these days, yawn, it has at least half a dozen endings.

Really, must we fling this filth at our pop kids?