I love a mummy. Who doesn’t love their mummy?
Mummy monster movies have always fascinated me, even if there’s never been a truly great mummy movie like there have been for Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula. The very visual idea of a corpse wrapped in bandages touches on some kind of universal terror. They’re not zombies – they’re something kind of worse, caught forever in a sort of half-life. I dressed up as a mummy one year for Halloween wearing yellow pajamas that were draped in toilet paper. The paper unraveled after a few blocks, but I didn’t care. Mummies are cool, man.
Universal Pictures brought the first mummy movies to the cinema, not too many years after the discovery of King Tut’s tomb created a kind of Egypt-mania. But while Universal churned out five Mummy movies in the ’30s and ‘40s, they’ve never quite been regarded as classics like Bride of Frankenstein or The Invisible Man. Still, the first time I saw these movies years ago, there was something about them I liked.
As a “character,” the Mummy in the Universal movies is generally lacking, especially after the first Boris Karloff film. He’s mute, he shambles and lurches and somehow still manages to kill a lot of people despite only having one working arm and leg. But darn it, he just LOOKS great, with the iconic makeup by Frankenstein’s monster magician Jack Pierce, and there’s something I like about the idea of an ancient horror coming to life in modern America. While the Mummy is a somewhat blank canvas compared to flashier movie monsters, you can see a lot of his relentless stalking and silent menace in later killers like Halloween’s Michael Myers and Friday The 13th’s Jason Voorhees.
Most of the 1940s Mummy series is formulaic to a fault, and increasingly cheap, each one barely over an hour long. Yet I still enjoy them for what they are – pulpy monster stories that don’t demand too much of you, but you’ll be guaranteed to see some murderin’ mummy action and just enough moments to remind you of why the very idea of a mummy still creeps us out.
The Mummy (1932)
The one that started it all, but if you’ve never seen it, it’s very different than you might think. On a high from Frankenstein, Boris Karloff stars as Egyptian high priest Imhotep, the “mummy” of the title, but he only actually appears wrapped up in linen for one brief scene. For the rest of the movie, the revived Imhotep is an eccentric yet apparently ordinary man, working as an Egyptian historian. Imhotep’s secret is that he’s searching for the reincarnation of his lost love, and hatching a millennia-old plot of revenge and lust. The Mummy is far more of a kind of Gothic horror than a monster movie, a gorgeously filmed slow burn with Karloff delivering one of his best performances as the creepy stalker Imhotep. It’s more of a ghost story, really. There’s only that brief proper mummy scene but throughout the film makeup mastermind Pierce gives Karloff a withered, haunting look. The Mummy is not quite scary, but genuinely disturbing and bitterly sad, the story of an eternal lost love. Karloff’s haunting eyes tell a story better than even the best makeup could, really.
Rating: Four and a half pyramids (out of five)
The Mummy’s Hand (1940)
The idea of movie “reboots” didn’t exist in 1940, really, but for all intents and purposes, Mummy’s Hand starts an entire new series of Mummy movies, introducing the ancient Kharis (Tom Tyler). The shuffling “mummy stereotype” that most of us first think of when we think of mummies begins here, in a gaudy B-movie that, while inferior to the arty drama of The Mummy, was actually lot more influential on the mummy image over the years. Thousands of years ago, Kharis attempted to bring his dead lover Princess Ananka back to life, but was caught by the temple priests and mummified alive for his crimes. Centuries later, a group of adventurers discover his tomb in Egypt and accidentally free him, and thus the murdery hijinks ensue. Much of the plot that animates the entire series starts here – an ancient order of cultish priests have guarded the mummy’s secrets for centuries and Kharis is kept alive by “tanna leaves” that rejuvenate him from his hibernation. Unfortunately the cool ideas at the heart of Mummy’s Hand are buried in sloppy execution, a slow plot, dated racial condescension towards the Egyptian people and far too much lame Abbott-and-Costello style comic relief with the highly annoying sidekick “Babe” (Wallace Ford). I rarely wanted a supporting character to be strangled by a mummy as much as I did “Babe.” While this one sets the template for the franchise, with an ever-returning Kharis wreaking vengeance in various ways, it’s a pretty dull monster movie, with sub-par Indiana Jones-style antics and no mummy action until well over halfway through. While Tyler’s reptilian Mummy is very creepy – with vivid blacked-out eyes, he’s a lot scarier than his successor Lon Chaney Jr would be – he gets very little screen time.
Rating: Three pyramids
The Mummy’s Tomb (1942)
Arguably, the best of the movies after the Karloff original, once you get past the pointlessly long 10-minute recap of the last movie at the beginning. For one thing, annoying Babe returns and is quickly killed off by the Mummy, who goes on a major revenge murder spree here. The story picks up 30 years after Mummy’s Hand, with the returned Mummy and his Egyptian sidekick (an excellent, feline Turhan Bey) now in America. They’re hanging out in a New England college town hunting down members of the expedition from Mummy’s Hand and wiping them out without mercy. I actually quite like them bringing the Mummy to America, where his old-world menace seems somehow more terrifying and disorienting. Having the Mummy stalk suburban streets is highly creepy. Nobody escapes the Mummy’s curse, these movies constantly remind us, and they actually live up to that claim by wiping out any survivors from previous movies quickly. It’s Lon Chaney Jr’s debut as the Mummy he would go on to play for three movies, but it’s hard to imagine a less thankless role for an actor. He’s mostly played as an unthinking weapon. Even Frankenstein’s monster could emote more, and Chaney reportedly hated the job (fun fact – the alcoholic Chaney reportedly gimmicked the mummy costume up so he could sip vodka all the day long). Despite its flaws, this feels like the platonic ideal of a Universal Mummy movie, and it’s got far more Mummy action than the first two in the series, and a spectacular fiery climax which is probably the best “boss battle” we get in these Mummy movies.
Rating: Four pyramids
The Mummy’s Ghost (1944)
By Mummy No. 4, Universal’s mummy-mania started to unravel a bit. The by-now mandatory “ancient Egyptian priest passes on his duties” features the priest who died at the beginning of The Mummy’s Tomb! The best and most interesting bit is the idea of Kharis’ doomed lover Princess Ananka being reincarnated into the modern day, an idea first introduced in the Karloff Mummy and later used in the Hammer and Brendan Fraser Mummy franchises. Ever since The Mummy’s Ghost resurrected (sorry) the idea, if you’re doing a mummy story, you’ll probably fit reincarnation in there somewhere. Unfortunately, that plot is introduced in a movie that feels almost like a step-by-step remake of Mummy’s Tomb, with Kharis once again murdering his way around New England. The cast are uniformly forgettable except for John Carradine (in a bit of unfortunate brown-face) as the latest sinister Egyptian cult handler for Kharis, but Lon Chaney gets to emote a little bit more in the stifling Mummy makeup than usual. Also, there’s a cute dog. What lifts Ghost from total mediocrity is the bleakest ending of the entire series, where for once, the monster basically wins. The Mummy movies are all pulpy silliness, but the final scene where the monster and his doomed reincarnated love sink into quicksand always haunted me a little. Unfortunately, dead never means dead when you’re a mummy and there was one more to go…
Rating: Three and a half pyramids
The Mummy’s Curse (1944)
Churned out less than six months after Ghost, which has to be some kind of record. The Mummy’s Curse immediately gets off on the wrong foot by picking up 25 years after the last movie with the Mummy still lost in a swamp, except for some inexplicable reason instead of New England the setting is now a hackneyed cajun Louisiana filled with cringeworthy Black stereotypes. (A character actually says, twice, “The devil’s on the loose and he’s dancing with the mummy!”) A kind of hacky laziness dominates Curse, which with the slippery flexible timelines of the series should logically be set sometime around the year 1995. In addition to Kharis coming back, the reincarnated Princess Ananka also gets to rise from the dead in this one as an amnesiac – the best scene in the movie is when she rises, eerily, from the swamps. It’s one way the otherwise rote Curse breaks a bit from the formula. The leading man here is so colourless he’s almost transparent, and the entire movie feels like a rerun – once again, we get a lengthy exposition scene and flashback by those pesky inept Egyptian priests and once again we hear about the magic of tanna leaves, and for the third movie in a row a priest betrays the Mummy because he gets the hots for a girl. Poor Lon Chaney doesn’t even get to appear unmasked as Kharis in the flashback scene, because as part of the general cheapness old Tom Tyler footage from Mummy’s Hand is used again. Universal’s Mummy series was never Shakespeare, but by instalment number five all the life had been squeezed out of the premise, which actually ended pretty definitively in Mummy’s Ghost. It’s amazing how this one-armed, one-legged slow Mummy managed to strangle quite so many people during his run, though.
Rating: Two pyramids
Was this the final blessed peace of the grave for the mummy? Well, Kharis was done, but mummies would return again and again, next in the rather daft Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy in 1955, and then with Hammer’s quite good Christopher Lee-starring The Mummy in 1959 and many other mummies in the years since. You can’t keep a good dead man down.
Nik Dirga 