Thirty years after The Mummy’s Hand, Steve Banning (Dick Foran) is happily retired, regaling his son John (John Hubbard) and fiancée Isobel (Elyse Knox) with tales of ancient Egypt. Little do the Bannings know, however, that the mummy Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.) was not destroyed; instead, he has been reanimated by Mehemet Bey (Turhan Bey) to seek revenge against all who desecrated the tomb of Princess Ananka.
Of its sixty-minute runtime, The Mummy’s Tomb includes twelve minutes of stock footage from The Mummy’s Hand, designed to catch the audience up on the legend of Kharis (two years was a long time without the benefit of DVD or streaming services). It may be that this extended “previously on” segment made me overly nostalgic for The Mummy’s Hand, since all the boring bits are excluded while only the morbid mummy action gets replayed. This recap/best-of reel is supposed to set the table for The Mummy’s Tomb, but it indirectly shines a light on everything that Tomb does wrong.
For one, there is something inherently incongruous about a mummy picture set in Massachusetts. For all its faults, The Mummy’s Hand was at its most watchable during the dig sequences that unearthed the mummy. (See also, naturally, 1999’s The Mummy, which is set entirely in Egypt.) To relocate the action to America gives the whole proceeding a patent absurdity – as, for example, in the moments when we see Kharis shambling his way across a quaint New England wooden bridge. One might argue that the American protagonists are suitably averse to superstition, allowing the mummy to wreak plenty of havoc before being discovered, but The Mummy’s Tomb treats the “discovery of the supernatural” as a routine procedural element of the plot, as many of the Universal Monster movies did.
If I were hosting Monster March in chronological order, this would certainly be Lon Chaney Jr. week; alongside The Mummy’s Tomb, Chaney headlined The Wolf Man, The Ghost of Frankenstein, and Son of Dracula, all in the span of two years. In many ways, The Wolf Man was the part Chaney was born to play – because he’s nowhere near as engaging in the other roles. As Kharis, Chaney seems to be sleepwalking, though I’ll grant you that the role of The Mummy is almost never the most interesting performance in any of these Universal Monster movies. (Excepting, of course, Boris Karloff.) As before, Kharis is speechless and barely mobile, though even his brief moments of physical activity seem not to have the potency of Tom Tyler’s prior interpretation of the part.
The rest of the cast, too, is given nothing much to enact. Dick Foran and Wallace Ford reprise their roles from The Mummy’s Hand, though they have no scenes together, which seems a terrible waste. Moreover, both are charged with playing the characters thirty years hence, which seems an odd creative decision – though, in fairness, both actors do a decently convincing job playing much older than they are. Elyse Knox is the quintessential damsel in distress here, especially in a retread of the “priest’s bride” third act turn from The Mummy’s Hand. Only Turhan Bey, as the mummy’s high priest, is given any substantive material to perform; he does an admirable job being captivated by the mysticism of the mummy, though the film largely relegates him to the “strange foreigner” stereotype, right down to the fact that the residents of Mapleton, Massachusetts, immediately (and, I grant you, rightly) suspect that the mummy must be connected to their new Egyptian neighbor.
Despite running about as long as an episode of your average streaming service television show (once you get that longer-than-average recap out of the way), The Mummy’s Tomb manages not to do anything new with that runtime. Even three scant films into the franchise, we’ve seen all this before and better. The mummy may be more violent than last time, but he’s also slower and sleepier – just as the plot is. There’s less suspense to be had in The Mummy’s Tomb, and I can’t help but feel a bit cheated that we never really get to see much of the eponymous tomb. That dissonance – a tomb-less Tomb – might say all we need to know for this Mummy Monday.
Next week for Mummy Monday, prepare to be haunted by The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine.
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