The DCOM Pantheon #1: Under Wraps (dir. Don Rhymer, October 25, 1997)

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

I typically watch Marvel and Star Wars movies once, have a good time with them, and then move on. The Mandalorian was great, and I'm more interested in Imagineering documentaries than most, but for me, the lasting appeal of Disney+, the biggest entertainment company's big streaming service, is in its mostly-complete unpacking of the Disney vault. D+ offers some of the best movies of all time (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), notorious flops waiting for people like me to finally give them a chance (John Carter) and musicals everybody I know could sing front-to-back on command (The Little Mermaid). It also has a bunch of Herbie the Love Bug movies. That's the stuff I care most about. Mando blew up his last Herzog over a year ago, but I still have a D+ subscription because of what many probably consider to be filler.

In The DCOM Pantheon, I'm going to dig into the greatest filler of all, Disney Channel Original Movies (DCOMs). I'm going to watch them all chronologically, at least until I hit 2003 or so, by which point I was long gone and even my little sisters had started to move on. I'm also going to rank them.

There's some contention about what the first DCOM even was. Walt Disney Television had produced "Premiere Films" for 14 years before the "Disney Channel Original Movie" designation rolled out, and some of those films, like Susie Q and the Elisabeth Moss remake of Escape From Witch Mountain, were rerun as often as DCOMs were. It's all basically the same, written with the same budget in mind, directed at the same demographics. Maybe there was executive turnover, maybe the station went through a minor-rebranding, maybe "Disney Channel Original Movie" just tested better than "Disney Channel Premiere Film." Whatever the reason, a distinction was made in 1997 with one of two movies. Disney fans are a puritanical group who will gently push each other on minutiae, and there's some debate over whether the first DCOM is August's Northern Lights or October's Under Wraps.

For the purposes of this column, I was ready to cover every base, follow Disney's official fan club listing and review Northern Lights, but I can't find it anywhere. I can't stream it on the app and I can't rent it online. I could spend $30 on a VHS copy, but that would delay this article by a couple weeks, and I've already been putting it off for a while. It's strange how inaccessible the movie is, too, because Northern Lights stars Diane Keaton, who was (at the time) far and away the biggest star Disney landed for one of their TV movies. But it's gone.

It doesn't especially bug me that I can't watch this movie. I have fifty more to get through. It's illustrative, though, of how surprisingly terrible Disney is at preserving parts of their history. You can watch Snow White on anything with a screen, and there'll be new Winnie the Pooh and Tinkerbell merch as long as there's any demand, but when Disney wants to get rid of something, they really make it vanish. If it weren't for YouTube, I'd assume I had made up shows like Marsupalami, Secret Life of Toys and Dumbo’s Circus. These things do sometimes resurface–before Disney+, a thousand people like me remembered Bonkers but had no way to watch it. I'm thankful D+ exists, but I'll routinely remember and then search for Dr. Syn, Alias The Scarecrow or Welcome to Pooh Corner and find that Disney's all but disowned it. When Disney does acknowledge these things, it's brief and expensive. For a company with a reputation for fleecing its fans, Disney's proven happy to throw away thousands of hours of movies and TV shows.

So Northern Lights is off. Under Wraps is... also not on Disney+. There's a remake coming, but the original is buried or something make your own pun. Luckily, you can rent it through other outlets.

Under Wraps opens pretty spectacularly, if not appropriately: A family sits at a dinner table, and as the kids squabble about whether there's a boogeyman in one of their closets, their parents tell them monsters aren't real. The kids go off to bed, content that they're safe. Mom also leaves, at which point Dad clumsily drops a knife in the garbage disposal. It's spinning around, blade up, when an undead thing with rotting flesh and ripped up clothes bursts through the kitchen window, yells "Am I real enough for you?" and shoves Dad's screaming head into the knife. I had remembered Under Wraps as the "funny mummy movie." This had slipped my mind. We are three minutes into Under Wraps and, though we don't actually see anybody's head get torn apart, it is easily as graphic as anything Disney's put out in the past 20 years. If you added blood, it would look like an early Sam Raimi scene.

But we're actually in a movie theater! The camera pulls back and this is all just part of Warthead IV: A Day in the Country, a movie two tween friends are watching. One of them (Gilbert) is a little scaredy-cat wimp for not wanting to watch hardcore face mutilation and the other (Marshall) says he won't bring his buddy to screenings anymore if he can't hack it. You can guess which one of the two has glasses.

The movie-within-a-movie's Fulci content is a little much, but it quickly establishes that DCOMs are going to be for 11-year-olds and not their little 9-year-old siblings. Like YA novels and Disney Channel's own sitcoms, these movies are marketed to kids who might think what they're watching is actually for an older set. We'll get into this more with movies like Brink!, but Disney's plan with these was to set the DCOMs in and around high schools, even if actual high school kids would feel a decade too mature for these ideas of cool. When you're very young, your whole life is trying to act like you've been there before. "Of course I love movies for teens. My parents let me watch stuff like this all the time."

On the boys' way home from the movie theater, it comes out that Gilbert's paper route includes the neighborhood crank, but David hasn't asked for payment for two years because the old man's house is so scary. Marshall gives him a hard time and the two kids march up to Mr. Kubat's house, ready to demand Gilbert's money. Kubat releases his dog on the kids and they run away.

A few days later, Gilbert and Marshall are back at school and Amy, their Third Friend Who Is A Girl, tells them Kubat's died. Amy's mom is the real estate agent responsible for selling Kubat's house and happens to know it's full of "weird stuff." The kids sneak into the basement and discover hundreds of recalled VHS copies of The Little Mermaid where you can see the priest's erection a friendly mummy.

They flee again, but decide to find the mummy after learning that if he isn't back in his sarcophagus by midnight on Halloween, he'll crumble and die. He's dead, clearly, but the mummy will be dead in a worse way than he already is. When the kids return to the basement, the mummy is gone! The mummy openly wanders around their small suburb. But everybody's too preoccupied with their own stuff to notice him! He manages to walk into a busy hospital. But the doctors think he's a burn victim!

Our tween heroes bring the mummy back to Marshall's house, name him Harold, and try to figure out how to reconnect Harold with his now-missing coffin. You see, it turns out Mr. Kubat faked his own death in a tax evasion scam and took the sarcophagus with him on the way out of town. The kids try to get the sarcophagus away from Kubat, Kubat sends his goons to recover Harold and somewhere along the way Harold finds his long lost love (mummified but inanimate) at the local museum's Egypt exhibit. She has breasts, which is surprising and unrealistic but is I guess important for our understanding that Harold is a strictly hetero mummy. Children understand when the dead are cursed to walk the land but will absolutely start crying if two androgynous mummies kiss.

The kids steal the sarcophagus back, running through a Halloween party (a must for 90s movies set around the holiday) and an ice cream factory. They reunite Harold with his queen, who regains life just long enough to embrace him, and they settle into their coffins and return to the good kind of death.

I enjoyed Under Wraps on its terms. It's a fun, goofy movie about a suburban mob trafficking mummies. The makeup is good, the story moves and there's a running joke about the kids' misunderstanding of the word "celibate" that actually made me smile. The best DCOM movies, which is to say "the ones I remember," all had little sci-fi twists, and Under Wraps is a nice little intro to that idea. It's simple, but I get why you'd remake this DCOM if you were going to revisit any of them.

What I had remembered from childhood: I knew there was a mummy and that one of the kids pretended to be into clogging (that is to say, tap-dancing in clogs) as a cover-up for Harold's banging around. I knew a little kid yelled "That's a mummy! Cool!" because it frequently played in Disney Channel's bumpers and promos. My family got cable a year or two after Under Wraps had premiered, and I mostly remember that it would come back every Halloween and that it seemed like it had been made in the early 90s. The Disney Channel played plenty of late-80s/early-90s kids movies I hadn't been familiar with (sequels to The Neverending Story, things you can't even find on DVD like Kids of the Round Table and Magic Island, etc.) and I assumed it was something like that. I don't think I made the connection that Under Wraps was the first DCOM until years later.

The year is 1997: Marshall has trouble connecting with his step-dad. On its own, the concept of divorce isn't "so 1997," but the well-meaning step-dad who gets kept at arm's length is a very 90s tween movie character. Only 90s kids will remember that their step-parents were just trying their best when they asked if you wanted to play catch. Amy mentions the Psychic Friends Network. She also makes fun of a classmate who "saw that Olsen twins movie twice." The guy who runs the local oddity shop says he loves Warthead IV and doesn't care what Siskel and Ebert say. Harold plays with a Koosh FlingShot. A SuperSoaker fight breaks out. Gilbert puts on a pink feather boa and sunglasses and says he's dressed up as Dennis Rodman.

Wouldn't fly today!: It isn't politically incorrect or anything, but I can't imagine that horror movie opening would be allowed anywhere near a Disney Channel production now. So Weird, the network's closest thing tonally to Under Wraps, never went this hard. Later, a kid sees Harold in the wild and says he's an ugly man, and his mother scolds "I told you, some people are just... born special." I think/hope we retired "special" years ago. Amy tells Gilbert she sleeps "in the nude," which is a surprising joke for a movie to make about a 12-year-old girl. On hearing this, Gilbert biked into a mailbox and I said "holy shit" out loud even though I was watching the film on my laptop, with headphones, alone.

The _____ was in your heart the whole time: wherewithal to help a mummy return to hell

Before they were big: Bill Fagerbakke, who plays Harold the mummy and Marshall's step-dad, would start voicing Patrick Starr on Spongebob Squarepants when it premiered two years later. When you know this, Harold's moans sound a lot like Patrick's grunts. The oddity shop owner is a voice actor most famous (to me) for playing Baby Bob, star of FreeInternet.com ads and a subsequent Fox sitcom. And this is Don Rhymer's final director credit, but he would go on to write the Big Momma's House movies and non-Disney animated features like Rio and Surf's Up.

Well after they were big: Character actor Ed Lauter plays old man Mr. Kubat.

Ultimate Ranking:

Under Wraps

Ultimate Ranking Notes: I have nothing to compare this to.