Monster March II: The Mummy Returns (2001)

For as much as I love The Mummy – and as much as I loved The Mummy Returns when it came out in 2001 – I haven’t seen it all the way through in many years, and its fortunes only waned in the intervening decades. By the time I got back to The Mummy Returns, after watching all the Universal Classic Monsters films and seeing the 1999 film more times than I can count, The Mummy Returns is so ephemeral, so underwhelming, that it’s hard to believe these are the same filmmakers.

With their ten-year-old son Alex (Freddie Boath) in tow, adventurer Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his archeologist wife (Rachel Weisz) accidentally trigger a chain reaction that will awaken the slumbering Scorpion King (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), whose ancient army threatens to destroy the world. Meanwhile, the mummified high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) is resurrected by the reincarnation of his lost love Anck-Su-Namun (Patricia Velasquez), who wants the power of the Scorpion King for herself.

 

Here’s the thing about The Mummy Returns – Brendan Fraser is having so much fun that it’s very easy to overlook the fact that this film isn’t really very good at all. The first film was lightning in a bottle, clipping along without any dead weight and taking itself seriously enough that the audience could play along too. The Mummy Returns is, plainly put, bonkers; very little of it makes sense outside of the immediate scene you’re watching, and while it does obey its own internal logic, it’s akin to the logic of a dream, where details only connect if you force them together.

 

The Mummy Returns is full of, for lack of a better word, stuff. There’s a trio of brigands who never accomplish their disparate missions before Imhotep summarily dispatches them; an indestructible hot air balloon; a tribe of shrunken-head pygmy mummies; a sinister museum curator who never does any curating; an implicit prophecy regarding Rick O’Connell’s destiny; and no fewer than two distinct reincarnation subplots, neither of which fazes anyone in the film. These are all things that occur, in roughly this order, and no one comments on the fact that these things simply happen. I suppose that, after the events of The Mummy, these characters are well and truly prepared for anything, yet it’s hard to fathom anyone simply accepting this many unexplained phenomena in the span of one week. Recall that everything spectacular in The Mummy came back to Imhotep; here, there are so many supernatural forces jousting that the plot feels like a staged production at Pharoahic Times. 

 

So the plot doesn’t make much sense, a collection of bits rather than an integrated narrative, but I’m not entirely sure that one comes to a mummy film with “coherent plot” high on the list. The action sequences are a notch better than the ones in the adventure-heavy Mummy, and it seems we can’t go fifteen minutes without something spectacular happening on screen. As much of an intellectual chore as the movie can become, requiring leaps of logic and credulity, the action scenes are well-staged, particularly an early banger in which the crew are accosted by mummies aboard a double-decker bus. This flavor of action doesn’t align with the gee-whiz thrills of the first film, but it’s respectably dynamic and worth rewatching out of context. So too the pygmy mummy attack, which makes not a lick of sense in the structure of the film and has no real purpose for being there, but which is nevertheless suitably creepy and electrifying on its own merits.

 

Perhaps the biggest problem with The Mummy Returns is that it is never quite a mummy movie. Imhotep’s reanimation and revivification feels perfunctory, designed to move the character as quickly as possible into position as a comic book supervillain. As much as the film outfits itself with the trappings of reincarnation and dynastic Egypt, it has no larger theme or purpose for these matters beyond the fact that they were principal concerns of the first film. The Mummy Returns is a cliché of a sequel, doing it all over again but only a little bit differently – and losing so much of the magic in the process. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a gag near the climax in which young Alex struggles to read the hieroglyph “Amenophus”; Jonathan gleefully reminds us that he too had the same problem in the first film. But beyond the surface-level pleasure of remembering better days, The Mummy Returns is serving only lukewarm leftovers.

 

Put another way, The Mummy remains one of my favorite films of all time, yet The Mummy Returns is little better than a footnote, as if to say, “Oh, yes, and they made another one, too.”

 

The Mummy Returns is rated PG-13 for “adventure action and violence.” Written and directed by Stephen Sommers. Starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo, Oded Fehr, Patricia Velasquez, Freddie Boath, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Monster March II: The Mummy (1999)

If you’re having a sense of déjà vu, don’t be alarmed. We did review the Universal Mummy films back in March, and we even reviewed this remake in 2012. But for an entry on the Personal Canon itself, it deserves more than 270 words. The Mummy is one of my all-time favorite movies. Here’s why.

Thousands of years after the high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) was condemned to an eternity of suffering, librarian Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) and her treasure-seeking brother Jonathan (John Hannah) hire adventurer Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) to lead them to the fabled lost city of Hamunaptra. Beneath the sands of Hamunaptra, though, the mummified Imhotep sleeps, and this band of explorers will soon learn that what awaits them is something other than buried treasure – and infinitely worse than death.

 

I’ve long made the joke that The Mummy may as well be called Indiana Jones and the Curse of Hamunaptra. With a similar pace, setting, atmosphere, and attitude, The Mummy needs only a few cosmetic tweaks to sneak its way into the Indiana Jones franchise for good. Brendan Fraser is heroically fun as our cocky swashbuckling protagonist, a kind of early “fortune and glory” iteration of the good Dr. Jones. He’s got the self-aware sarcasm down pat, yet he can flip to sincerity with a well-timed smolder. In short, Fraser is the key to the movie allowing us to have fun – he’s very clearly enjoying himself, too. Like Fraser, the movie is a master of its own tone, zany and madcap at one turn, cavalier and daring at the next, without losing any of its own integrity. The movie might poke fun at itself, but it never makes a fool of its audience.

 

Fraser is the perfect model for what’s going on with The Mummy because the film overall is never boring. If it’s not being funny, it’s ably building tension or hosting a rollicking action sequence, helped in no small part by Jerry Goldsmith’s rousing score. As the old meme goes, Jerry Goldsmith didn’t have to go so hard, but he did that – he did that for all of us. Goldsmith’s orchestral work soars, dabbles in the romantic, and plays around in the Arabesque; it works perfectly in the film, and it’s a darned good listen outside of the cinema, too. Longtime readers of the blog know that a good score is often my favorite thing about a movie, and you can get away with a lot if the music is doing its work right. Goldsmith is trying to do an uncomplicated arrangement a la Old Hollywood, but his use of motifs and swirling patterns mean this score isn’t one to ignore. (And yes, I was listening to the score as I wrote this review. How could you tell?)

 

Among the rest of the cast, everyone is doing their level best to make this world believable, and they do succeed. Weisz and Hannah are divinely cast as bickering siblings – somewhat broadly caricatured, it’s true, but their devotion to the clichés make these characters feel real. Arnold Vosloo, meanwhile, has a real presence as Imhotep, and though he doesn’t say much he’s expressively sinister in the scenes when he has all his skin; when he’s in ‘monster mode,’ Imhotep is creepy and ghastly to behold, which is all the better when the movie needs that quick jolt of terror that only a decaying corpse can deliver.

 

Then there’s the smaller supporting roles, a veritable who’s-who of late-90s character actors. Oded Fehr (who, incidentally, played a terrorist on Sleeper Cell while Vosloo played one on 24) is tons of fun as the dead-serious protector of Hamunaptra, while Kevin J. O’Connor is equally a blast in the role of servile weasel Beni, handily a top goon in the annals of monster movies. And don’t sleep on Erick Avari, indisputably the fin-de-siècle king of “Hey, it’s that guy!”, in the thankless role of fez-wearing museum curator Dr. Bey (not to be confused with Fehr’s Ardeth Bay); in mummy movies, there’s always a guy with a fez, and there’s always a shady museum curator, so Avari is the pristine cherry on top of a perfect sundae.

 

One of the things I’ve always loved about The Mummy isn’t quite apparent in the film itself, though it’s equally impossible to ignore. In 1999, The Mummy comes at the tail end of a decade of period pulp films, which is precisely my favorite flavor of cinematic ice cream. I’m thinking of films like Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer, The Shadow, and The Phantom – all of which I loved as a child and still do as an adult. We can enroll Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman in this pattern, and indeed we might even consider it the progenitor of a host of imitations to follow. At the climax of the decade, The Mummy is arguably the most successful of these period pulps, though I’ll always have an elemental soft spot for The Rocketeer. I’m a sucker for this kind of heightened reality, placed into a distinct historical past, without postmodern cynicism or deliberate genre subversion. Take a story and a time period, and revel in it; that’s what The Mummy does best of all.

 

The Mummy is rated PG-13 for “pervasive adventure violence and some partial nudity.” Directed by Stephen Sommers. Written by Stephen Sommers, Lloyd Fonvielle, and Kevin Jarre. Starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo, Oded Fehr, and Kevin J. O’Connor.

Monster March: The Mummy's Curse (1944)

Before I watched The Mummy’s Curse, the final mummy movie for Monster March, I feared that I would end up saying the same things I had said for each of the Karloff-less mummies: that it was the umpteenth remake of the same basic premise, stodgy and lumbering, uncharismatic and mildly xenophobic – in short, that I had seen all this before and hadn’t much liked it then. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that The Mummy’s Curse does some things I hadn’t yet seen in a Universal Monster movie, though that still doesn’t amount to a hearty recommendation.

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. 

 

The Mummy’s Curse is not rated. Directed by Leslie Goodwins. Written by Bernard Schubert, Leon Abrams, and Dwight V. Babcock. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Peter Coe, Dennis Moore, Kay Harding, Martin Kosleck, Virginia Christine, and Addison Richards. 

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with House of Dracula (1945) starring John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Onslow Stevens, and Glenn Strange.

Monster March: Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955)

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy is a film of lasts. It’s Abbott and Costello’s last film at Universal (and their penultimate film together), it’s the final mummy film in the Classic Monsters cycle, and it’s the last movie I’ve watched in reviewing Monster March. There is, for me, an unintentional sense of finality in this movie, which can only work in favor of the film; it also helps that this is, as Mummy Mondays have taught us, the second-best of the original mummy films.

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello (playing themselves, lest the credits fool you) overhear that the mummy Klaris (Eddie Parker) has been discovered – and with him the fabled treasure of Princess Ara. Abbott and Costello blunder their way into a murder investigation, the disappearance of a crucial amulet, and eventually the dig site itself as they try to dodge treasure seekers (Marie Windsor, Michael Ansara) and high priests (Richard Deacon) alike.

 

Where Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man felt tired and overlong, a collision of genres that didn’t play well together, Meet the Mummy is tight, energetic, and laser-focused on spoofing the Egyptian adventure genre. The plot is overfull, to be sure, particularly when it comes to gangs of avaricious conspirators (many of whom look perplexingly similar), but there’s a sense that Abbott and Costello don’t quite know what’s going on either, making it much easier to roll with the punches. 

 

This being Monster March, there is a surprising dearth of mummy action. There is a mummy, though it’s unclear whether Klaris is Kharis with a name change or an entirely different mummy defending a princess’s tomb. He’s not on screen very much, though, and he never leaves his tomb. His wrappings look a little more like striped pajamas, but there is something iconic about the way his nose is obscured by a bandage as he snarls and hisses at his prey. Where the other mummies looked a bit like they were wearing full-face masks or faces made of papier-mâché, this mummy finally looks as though there’s a rotting corpse under the bandages. It’s only a pity we don’t get to see more of him on screen – though as fast as Costello runs away from danger, a lumbering mummy stands no chance of catching him.

 

While we don’t have as much mummy as the title promises, the chemistry between Abbott and Costello is stronger than it was in Meet the Invisible Man. For one, they don’t have to work around the premise of being private detectives or boxers; those aren’t highbrow concepts, to be sure, but compare that to Meet Frankenstein, in which their occupation as delivery boys was only incidental to the plot and quickly disregarded. Here, they’re just two drifters who happen to bumble into the plot, fumble around it, and tumble headlong into the mummy’s tomb for the final act. It’s a perfect set-up for a monster movie send-up, especially continuing the cynic/believer dynamic from Meet Frankenstein. What’s more, their patter is back to form; in one hilarious sequence, they argue about the meaning of the word “pick” – “My pick is the shovel!” “My pick is the pick!” and so on. 

 

In another great moment, Abbott and Costello try to pawn a cursed medallion off on each other. It’s first a game of pickpocketing, then a back-and-forth burger swap with one burger containing the amulet as an ersatz topping. While these bits go exactly where you would expect, the cumulative effect of seeing the situation play out longer and longer, doubling down on confusion rather than trying to illuminate, is uproarious. Compounding the comedy, perhaps more than in the other two parody films, Lou Costello has a penchant for breaking the fourth wall with a well-timed stare. Sometimes he’s saying, “Look what I have to put up with,” while other times it’s an impish “Ain’t I a stinker?” Every time he does it, without fail, it’s good for a chuckle.

 

It’s a boon that Abbott and Costello are so engaging here, because the rest of the cast is comprised of human “wet paint” signs. As the treasure seekers, Marie Windsor and Michael Ansara are mostly lifeless; their only saving grace is that their accomplice is played by Dan Seymour, sporting the same fez he wore in Casablanca, where he played the doorman Abdul. I point this out as a good thing because any reminder of Casablanca automatically raises my estimations of the movie (see also Invisible Agent). Meanwhile, Richard Deacon plays the cult leader Semu like a somnambulant Miguel Ferrer. It’s hard to imagine anyone being intimidated by this lanky, balding, sentient monotone; say what you will about George Zucco, dying multiple times as the same character in the same franchise – at least he had presence. 

 

At the end of the day, though, the Universal Classic Monsters franchise has never thrived with strong supporting casts. You get by with a little help from your mummy, and this is the first time since Karloff that I’ve enjoyed a mummy movie. Abbott and Costello are back to form here, sniping at every Egyptian cliché and genre trope. Meet the Mummy does a lot without doing too much, and watching this as my thirtieth monster movie took Monster March out with a smile. But don’t you go anywhere – you’ve still got three more days to go!

 

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy is not rated. Directed by Charles Lamont. Written by Lee Loeb and John Grant. Starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Marie Windsor, Michael Ansara, Richard Deacon, and Eddie Parker. 

Tune in tomorrow for Mummy Monday, with The Mummy’s Curse (1944) starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Virginia Christie.

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 Tomb (1942)

To borrow a formulation from actor/podcaster Griffin Newman, The Mummy’s Tomb makes The Mummy’s Hand look like The Mummy. Last week, I had barely complimented The Mummy’s Hand for being boring but watchable, but now I find myself in the position of looking back on Hand with rose-colored glasses. Having just been through The Mummy’s Tomb(in which the titular tomb barely appears), I didn’t know how good I had it – The Mummy’s Tomb is a real slog.

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.

 

The Mummy’s Tomb is not rated. Directed by Harold Young. Written by Neil P. Varnick, Griffin Jay, and Henry Sucher. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Dick Foran, John Hubbard, Elyse Knox, Wallace Ford, and Turhan Bey. 

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with Dracula’s Daughter (1936) starring Gloria Holden.

Next week for Mummy Monday, prepare to be haunted by The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine.

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.

Monster March: The Mummy (1932)

We’re kicking off Monster March with Mummy Monday, and who better to usher in a month of monster movie reviews than Boris Karloff himself? The Mummy is a real doozy, a whopper of a horror film that goes for Golden Age restraint with equal maximums of pathos and terror, and at the center of it all is a delightful performance by Karloff.

Ten years ago, the mummified remains of the high priest Imhotep disappeared from an archaeological expedition, and the explorer Sir Joseph Whemple (Arthur Byron) renounced his work after his assistant Ralph Norton (Bramwell Fletcher) went mad. A decade later, Sir Joseph’s son Frank (David Manners) is on a dig of his own, and with the help of Ardeth Bay (Boris Karloff) he locates the unbroken tomb of Princess Anck-es-en-Amon. But when the princess’s remains are transported to the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, Ardeth Bay reveals that he is the resurrected Imhotep, and his plans to revive his beloved revolve around Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann), who may be the princess reincarnated.

 

I don’t think it’s much of a secret around these parts that I’m an inordinate fan of Stephen Sommers’s 1999 film The Mummy, which is just about one of my favorite movies of all time. (I’ll say it just about every Monday this month, for those who aren’t paying attention.) Watching the 1999 Mummy directly before this Mummy might have been a mistake if 1932’s Mummy weren’t so engaging – I was struck by how captivating the movie was, despite having next to no resemblance to the Brendan Fraser vehicle I love so much (other than a few names in common). There’s none of the action/adventure swagger or sense of humor that hooked me in 1999; instead, what we get is a kind of mystical Romeo & Juliet, draped in Egyptian finery and laden with magical menace.

 

We’ll never be able to review a monster movie without turning to the creature at its center, and Karloff is divine as The Mummy. He’s only in rags for the first act of the film, where makeup artist Jack Pierce is the undisputed star of the film. This prologue, in which Imhotep is resurrected by Ralph Norton (no Honeymooners jokes, please), is the perfect tee-up for the film, loading it with dread right at the top as The Mummy lumbers away into the night. The next time we see Karloff, his skin looks like wizened parchment, and his hulking shuffle tells us straightaway that Ardeth Bay is barely among the living. Karloff’s voice, too, gives us the sense of the long-dead, a low roar coming from an expressionless visage. But there is a fire in his eyes (only occasionally literally), and we get the distinct impression just from his presence that he’s not to be taken lightly.

 

As with any monster movie, the supporting cast in a film like The Mummy is largely negligible. A mere year after his star-making turn in Frankenstein, Karloff was surely the box-office draw. Yet the cast of The Mummy is pleasantly up to the task of supporting Karloff, particularly Zita Johann, who’s given the generally-thankless role of “damsel in distress.” In the moments when she contemplates her own mortality, though, Johann is triumphantly terrified, and her reaction to being reincarnated is pretty compelling stuff (doubtless helped by Johann’s own belief in past lives). Elsewhere, Bramwell Fletcher practically steals the show in his one scene, in which he’s driven mad by witnessing The Mummy’s resurrection; it’s a classic example of “This isn’t going to go well” as the scene unfolds, the audience waiting on tenterhooks for the inevitable, and Fletcher’s manic giggle is the perfect punchline. And Edward Van Sloan, who’s fast becoming one of my favorite faces in the Universal Monsters canon, turns up to do another variation on his “man of science” routine from Dracula – this time, however, he’s the only character to admit that a resurrected mummy isn’t such a ridiculous proposition, and his particular brand of gravitas renders the absurd eminently plausible.

 

One thing to appreciate about these early monster movies is that they’re extremely lean, economical not just in terms of budget but in their approach to storytelling, as well. At 73 minutes, The Mummy doesn’t waste any time. It doesn’t try to fool you into thinking Ardeth Bay might not be The Mummy, nor does it bother to explain the magic behind his scrying pool or the resurrection ritual he’s plotting. In this way, The Mummy is deliciously refreshing – “just go with it,” the movie requests, and the result is that you see a language being built, establishing the iconography for every mummy film to follow.

 

It helps that this Mummy is fun in a different way; where my beloved 1999 Mummy is self-reflexive and gleefully camp, this Mummy is deadly serious about its own hokum. The result is that the film washes over you like a tidal wave of superstition and becomes very nearly scary in its intimation that there is a whole cosmology – not just a singular creature – beyond our understanding, so when the ending comes quite literally as a deus ex machina, it doesn’t feel like a storytelling cheat. Rather, it’s a fulfillment of Van Sloan’s warning at the top of the film to take curses seriously – in effect, it’s Chekhov’s Curse. Or in storytelling terms, don’t put a sarcophagus in your film unless it’s going to be opened, and don’t mention a curse if it won’t be levied against some unwitting fool.

 

The Mummy is not rated. Directed by Karl Freund. Written by John L. Balderston. Based on a story by Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer. Starring Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, David Manners, Edward Van Sloan, Arthur Byron, and Bramwell Fletcher.

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi.

Next week for Mummy Monday, behold the horror of The Mummy’s Hand (1940), starring Tom Tyler and Dick Foran.