Monster March: The Mummy's Ghost (1944)

There is no ghost in The Mummy’s Ghost. There is a swamp, a dog, and of course a mummy, but there’s no ghost, which might tell you everything you need to know about this movie. I know I said the exact same thing last week about The Mummy’s Tomb, but if the screenwriters couldn’t be bothered to derive a new story, neither should I write an entirely new review. In Ghost, there is a major plotline involving reincarnation, which seems particularly apt for a demi-remake that’s so familiar you’ll feel an acute sense of déjà vu. 

Yousef Bey (John Carradine) has come to New England in search of the mummy Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.), believed to have been destroyed during the events of The Mummy’s Tomb. As high priest, Yousef Bey has been tasked with bringing Kharis and the mummified remains of Princess Ananka back to Egypt. Meanwhile, local college boy Tom Hervey (Robert Lowery) is baffled by his Egyptian girlfriend Amina (Ramsay Ames), especially the mystery of why she fainted outside the home of the mummy’s latest victim...

 

The Mummy’s Ghost was filmed over the course of only one week, and I have to say it shows. Ghost is full of narrative dead-ends and plot holes, beginning from the very first reel. If you remember The Mummy’s Tomb (and I won’t fault you if you don’t), it starts with George Zucco as Andoheb recapping Kharis’s backstory while passing on the mantle of high priest before his death; The Mummy’s Ghost begins with exactly the same sequence, right down to Zucco reprising his role. Like Hyman Roth, it seems, Andoheb has been dying of the bullet wounds from The Mummy’s Hand for the last twenty years. (If you’re having trouble telling your Hand from your Tomb from your Ghost, don’t be alarmed – these titles don’t relate to the plot in any way and might as well be interchangeable. Next week’s Curse doesn’t quite help matters.)

 

As I’m watching these movies, I’m starting to wonder whether I actually like mummy movies or whether I only like the 1999 Mummy. I certainly don’t like this mummy movie, which feels as though I’ve seen it four or five times this month. Surely there must be more one can do with a mummy film than this, in which a priest pursues a mummy that acts like a serial killer until carting off the female lead in his withered arms. There’s also only so many times you can retread the plotline where an incredulous town doubts the existence of a mummy, despite several residents having been menaced by this very mummy in the past. At least this time they don’t try to light the mummy on fire – because that hasn’t worked in the last few movies – though the climax set in the swamp ends up having the same net effect.

 

The chief problem with Ghost, as with most of the Universal Mummy films, is that Kharis is not exactly a charismatic screen presence. In a cinematic universe populated by the likes of Karloff and Lugosi, even Lon Chaney Jr. has done better work as the Wolf Man. Behind his plaster face and bandaged limbs, Kharis is little more than a mindless brute, always acting at the behest of someone else. The script certainly tries its best to make him menacing, but it’s a strain on the audience’s credulity to suppose that no one can escape the grasp of the mummy, unless Kharis gives off some sort of stupefying aura that stuns his victims into immobility before he shambles near enough to strangle them with his one good arm.

 

In The Mummy’s Tomb, it fell to Turhan Bey to give an entertaining performance as Kharis’s caretaker, the high priest Mehemet Bey. In Ghost, it’s John Carradine, who’s practically bathing in a river of ham as Yousef Bey. (Any relation? If this were the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Beys would surely have their own show on Disney+.) Don’t get me wrong, Carradine is borderline hypnotic, but Egyptian he’s not, and that’s an incredible distraction, as is the fact that his abrupt third-act heel-turn is precisely the same “twist” that every foregoing mummy movie has pulled at exactly the same moment in the story.

 

Look, there’s a certain amount of formula to be expected from the Universal Classic Monsters. Dracula is always going to stalk and bite his victims, Frankenstein’s monster is always going to be born out of some misguided experiment, and the Wolf Man is constantly running from the moon and his own id. But for whatever reason, the seams of the formula really show on the mummy films, with almost predictable precision. Never mind the fact that the mummy films, more so than the other franchises, feel compelled to begin with a recap that effectively spoils the movie because the franchise’s obsession with reincarnation and the undead often means that there’s a cyclical nature to events, recurring and recurring as the tragic doomed Egyptians live out a vicious yet familiar recursion. All of this will happen at least once more, I’m quite sure, in The Mummy’s Curse, and I have a feeling I’ll be able to rerun this review next week, too, changing the names to protect the innocent – or, if none are found, the dull.

 

The Mummy’s Ghost is not rated. Directed by Reginald Le Borg. Written by Griffin Jay, Henry Sucher, and Brenda Weisberg. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Ramsay Ames, Barton MacLane, George Zucco, and Robert Lowery. 

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with Son of Dracula (1943) starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Next week for Mummy Monday, we’ll “wrap” things up with The Mummy’s Curse (1944), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Virginia Christine. But for bonus mummy shenanigans, stop by for Silly Sunday, when Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Eddie Parker.

Monster March: The Mummy's Hand (1940)

I had the distinct feeling after watching The Mummy’s Hand that I was about to forget everything I had seen. Never mind that the film is only 67 minutes long, half of which is astoundingly boring; the half that is interesting is wholly generic and entirely unmemorable. It’s a far cry from the Boris Karloff original and an even further cry from 1999’s The Mummy (which I contend is not just the best mummy movie ever made but one of the best adventure movies, period). 

Archaeologist Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and his assistant Babe Jenson (Wallace Ford) think they’ve stumbled upon the last clue to the location of Princess Ananka’s tomb. Initially discouraged by Professor Andoheb (George Zucco), Steve and Babe set off in search of their own funding, which they find in magician-cum-investor Tim “Solvani” Sullivan (Cecil Kellaway) and his daughter/assistant Marta (Peggy Moran). What they don’t know is that Andoheb is secretly the high priest of an order devoted to protecting Ananka, and this priest has a mummy (Tom Tyler) at his beck and call.

 

As I’m watching the Universal Classic Monster movies, it’s been fun to notice places where tropes were born, moments when story beats become ossified into canonical necessity. In the case of the Mummy films, I’ve been noticing echoes with the Stephen Sommers Mummy, and The Mummy’s Hand has those in spades – a down-on-his-luck adventurer, affluent investors, superstitious local diggers, a museum curator in league with a secret society. For being only the second Mummy movie, there’s a surprising amount of formula already at play in The Mummy’s Hand, even as it differentiates itself from the 1932 original by locating a solid half of the film to the archaeological dig site.

 

When the film gets to the dig site, the real mummy action kicks in, and The Mummy’s Hand is at a minimum watchable. That action is horribly cliché, and there’s a surprising lack of urgency despite the fact that the mummy Kharis is methodically killing off protagonists tent by tent over the course of what seems to be a single night. Having said that, though, there’s a certain engagement to be gained simply by having a supernatural creature skulk through your film and do his master’s dark bidding, and I have to say that there’s something charming about seeing the archetypal mummy action play out. Unlike Karloff’s Imhotep, Kharis is a silent and lumbering brute, lurching his way toward his victims, and makeup artist Jack Pierce adds another visual stunner into his repertoire. If nothing else, this mummy looks good.

 

“Watchable at best” is certainly damning with faint praise, and it’s a real wonder if audiences even make it that far. The first half-hour of the film is interminable in dragging out its exposition; The Mummy’s Hand opens with two old men droning on about mythic backstory before one expires, perhaps from boredom. Then the film sets up a long and uninteresting plot in which Steve Banning fundraises for his expedition before falling in with a magician who never does much magic beyond his introduction. (You’d hope, if Solvani is Chekhov’s Magician, he’d do a bit of prestidigitation to save the day. No such luck here.) These B-movie shenanigans truly diminish the film’s potential for horror to the point where you almost expect the gumball machine from Mystery Science Theater to pop up and start riffing on how dull the film is.

 

Often the best thing we can say about a bad Universal Monster film is that they rarely overstay their welcome. The Mummy’s Hand is brief, but it’s a slog, exacerbated by subpar acting that’s both monotonous and overly campy. Wallace Ford gets a few chuckles in as a Lou Costello type, though for comic relief he’s wildly out of place in the brand of monster movies Universal had perfected by 1940. The rest of the cast are the very definition of serviceable though largely indistinguishable from other versions of the same archetypes. Even Tom Tyler as Kharis is a bit of a snooze, and perhaps I was so desperate for something engaging that my first glimpse of a mummy got me to sit up and say, “I’ll take it.” But Kharis himself lacks any agency in the film; he’s at the mercy of Andoheb and his mystical tana leaves, which reanimate the mummy and set him off into the night. There’s a half-baked suspense plot about what might happen if Kharis gets his hands on an infinite supply of tana leaves, but none of the protagonists knows about this, so the net effect of anticipation is a wash. 

 

Ultimately, The Mummy’s Hand is an exercise in unmet expectations and settling for the first gruesome creature to shamble your way. It’s dull and (pardon the pun) lifeless, a reanimated clone of The Mummy drained of its excitement and fueled by the sort of scripting that might fit better on an episode of Svengoolie. Even with a runtime of little more than a hour, as Universal Monster sequels go, The Mummy’s Hand is a bust.

 

The Mummy’s Hand is not rated. Directed by Christy Cabanne. Written by Griffin Jay and Maxwell Shane. Starring Dick Foran, Peggy Moran, Wallace Ford, Eduardo Ciannelli, George Zucco, Cecil Kellaway, and Tom Tyler.

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with Drácula (1931) starring Carlos Villarías and Lupita Tovar.

Next week for Mummy Monday, enter The Mummy’s Tomb (1942) starring Lon Chaney Jr.