Twenty-five years after The Mummy’s Ghost, chief excavator Pat Walsh (Addison Richards) is draining the local swamp when he is approached by two men from the Scripps Museum, James Halsey (Dennis Moore) and Dr. Zandaab (Peter Coe), who have come to recover two mummies lost to the swamp ages ago. The murder of a worker suggests, however, that the mummy Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.) has already risen, while a mysterious woman (Virginia Christine) from the swamps may be the resurrected Princess Ananka herself.
For the final film in the franchise, The Mummy’s Curse is a mixed bag. There is so much of what we have seen before – literally, in the case of replaying footage from The Mummy and The Mummy’s Hand (in which, yes, it is distracting to see Boris Karloff and Tom Tyler again). There’s a resurrection plot, those omnipresent tana leaves, a secret society led by a sinister foreigner in a fez; there’s an incredulous populace and a staggering body count. There’s even a damsel in distress carted away by Kharis right at the top of the third act, with such mechanical precision that you can almost set your watch by it.
The Mummy’s Curse also continues the bizarre tradition of the retcon. I hadn’t made much about these in each preceding film, but since we’re at the end of the mummy road, it’s worth noting that every mummy film, excepting Karloff’s, has been a continuation of the same story. That story, however, has had its backstory revisited and rewritten, changing the motivations of Kharis and his connection to the Princess Ananka. Moreover, dead high priests return to life without a scratch, while mummies emerge from flames as though their bandages were made of asbestos. It’s also worth noting that the mummy films very deliberately explain lengthy gaps of time between installments, as with the aging of Tomb’s Stephen Banning (Dick Foran); if you followed the internal chronology of the films, Curse ought to be somewhere in the 1990s, not 1944.
The final continuity gaffe ends up being oddly central to The Mummy’s Curse. In The Mummy’s Ghost, Kharis and Ananka went into a swamp in upstate New York; in Curse, the swamp is somehow in Louisiana, deep in the heart of Cajun territory. The film stops short of any voodoo subplot – though that could have been interesting to mix with Egyptian mysticism – but we do have characters explicitly named Cajun Joe and Tante Berthe. (If you want voodoo with your Universal Monsters, you’ll have to check out Son of Dracula.) This continuity error exists largely on the level of set dressing, so it’s a bit bewildering why it even happens, but it’s a clear and deliberate choice to relocate the story.
In a way, though, I’ve neglected to make much ado about these continuity goofs because they’re part of the odd charm of the Universal Classic Monsters cinematic universe; you’d never recast Tony Stark or Luke Skywalker today (indeed, the crew of The Mandalorian bent over backwards not to), but these monster movies have always been a bit like planes built mid-flight, cobbled together with spare parts and scripts banged out over the course of a weekend. Even the early monster films like Dracula and Frankenstein were still working out the kinks of the talkies, actively struggling to transition from the stagey silent pictures into the slick productions of the 1940s.
You could even make the argument, specious though it may be, that the Universal Monsters helped usher in the eras of sequels and remakes. (I say specious, because both had literary precedent, and even Sophocles had his Oedipus trilogy.) The Mummy franchise has been a little bit of both, at once continuing and revisiting the same basic story. But it’s also been pushing the boundaries of invention; for all their Son of and family tree games, the Universal Monsters have also played with gender in interesting ways. Dracula’s Daughter may have been a bust, but The Mummy’s Curse introduces us to the first female mummy. Sofia Boutella, eat your heart out: Virginia Christine is captivating as Princess Ananka, and the silent sequence in which she rises from the swamp and bathes away the mud and embalming is as captivating as anything the mummy movies have given us. Even her amnesiac performance, as she struggles to account for her memories of Kharis, is a fine angle for the fifth film to take. One almost wishes that Curse had spent more time on that dimension, because the Kharis stuff is not unlike the mummy himself – stale, slow, and long past its prime.
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