`Mummy' -- It's Alive / Fraser unwraps the laughs in comic remake of horror classic

THE MUMMY: Comic horror. Written and directed by Stephen Sommers. Starring Brendan Fraser. (PG-13. 124 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

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The extravagantly trashy prologue to "The Mummy" is the tip-off.

Still, it is by no means a camp "Mummy, Dearest."

This comic horror movie emphasizes the comic, and Brendan Fraser is in his element. With his exaggerated features -- big eyes, big nose, big lips -- Fraser already looks like a comic-book hero. More importantly, he's got the flair and know-how to bring it off.

"The Mummy" digs up both laughs and chills from timeworn material.

From the gilded bodies of ancient priests about to die -- they are going to be "mummified alive" -- to the hokey subtitles in the prologue -- what do they think they are speaking, anyway, old Egyptian? -- this looks as if it's going to be big-time fun. It is.

Flash-forward to the mid-1920s and Fraser is soldier-of-fortune Rick O'Connell, who gets mixed up with a librarian Egyptologist (Rachel Weisz) and several types of treasure hunters, some of them high-minded, some of them greedy and some merely inept.

One of them is clueless enough to translate an ancient curse out loud and bring on a plague of locusts.

"The Mummy" reanimates the creature originally brought to life by Boris Karloff in 1932.

This time he is played by South African actor Arnold Vosloo ("Hard Target"), with an extraordinary boost in the horror department by the special effects of Industrial Light & Magic.

He is one creepy creature. The Mummy at first appears to have all his flesh stripped off, a sinewy skeleton that someone describes as "still juicy." He restores himself to functioning in this world -- and his eternal search for the king's mistress, who died for him -- by recycling body parts from his victims. His eyes and tongue had been ripped out, for starters.

Creepiest of all may be the hordes of chattering, flesh-eating beetles that periodically sweep through the treasure tomb. They really get under your skin.

It takes a while, but there finally is a signature shot from Karloff's original, of the Mummy's hand reaching up through the desert sand. It's like seeing an old friend.

Fraser ("Blast From the Past") is on a streak as far as classic movie creatures are concerned. As "Frankenstein" director James Whale's yard man in "Gods and Monsters," he sympathetically, and touchingly, identified with the monster. In "The Mummy," completely different in tone, he fearlessly tries to out-roar the monster and fails.

Asked what he has to do, he deadpans: "Rescue the damsel in distress. Kill the bad guy. Save the world."

Just when "The Mummy" starts to show signs of running out of steam, there is a revelation of the golden treasure tomb in a spectacular piece of art direction. There is a hand-to-hand battle between Rick and the mummy priests that is a marvelous combination of choreography for Fraser and digital effects for the monsters.

From the transmigration of souls to the entrance of the creature into a chamber via sand seeping through a keyhole, the ILM special effects are always at the service of the storytelling. They never seem gratuitous or done merely for virtuosic display.

Weisz, too, has a winning touch, whether stoutly declaring she's "proud to be a librarian" or dreamily waking to a kiss that turns out to be the creature's restored lips. Weaselly Kevin J. O'Connor takes full advantage of the role as second-banana villain Beni.

In this breezy version of "The Mummy," not only do the ancients speak some mumbo-jumbo that stands for old Egyptian, the curses are ungrammatical. "Death will come on swift wings to whomever opens this chest."

That about wraps it up.