Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971) - film review

On her 21st birthday, Margaret Fuchs receives a ring set with a huge ruby from her father, Professor Fuchs.  Unbeknown to Margaret, the ring is an ancient artefact which her father found on the severed hand of an evil Egyptian princess, Tera.  Margaret was in fact born at the exact moment that her father entered the tomb of Tera, to find the princess’s perfectly preserved body.  When several of his former colleagues on this expedition die suddenly, their throats horribly slashed, Professor Fuchs becomes fearful for his life and is appalled when he learns that his one time associate, Corbeck, intends to resurrect Tera through Margaret...

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb was the last of four Mummy films that Hammer made in the declining years of its series of Gothic horror films, the only one to be set in modern times.  It doesn’t feature the familiar bandaged-wrapped monster that we all know and love.  Instead, we have the stunning Valerie Leon in a revealing little Egyptian number that, along with the soft focus photography, might lead a casual viewer to mistake this for a soft core porn movie.  As a concession to the horror geeks, Leon does finally appear wrapped up in bandages at the end of the film, the one truly terrifying moment this low budget shocker has to offer.  

The film’s troubled production has led some to suggest that it may have been afflicted with a real Egyptian curse.  One day into the shoot, lead actor Peter Cushing learned that his wife had a life-threatening illness and withdrew from the project, to be replaced by Andrew Keir.  Then, at the beginning of the last week of filming, director Seth Holt suffered a fatal heart attack; Hammer executive Michael Carreras stepped into the breach and, depending on how you judge the end result, either salvaged the film or wrecked it.  The film certainly doesn’t match up to Seth Holt’s earlier Hammer offerings, Taste of Fear (1961) and The Nanny (1965), which are amongst the best the company produced.

Adapted from Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb is one of Hammer’s more unusual horror films, one that makes a brave attempt to nudge the Gothic horror genre in a new direction, but doesn’t quite succeed.  On the plus side. it is imaginatively shot, with strong scene-to-scene transitions and effective use of point-of-view shots which evoke a palpable sense of menace.  Likewise, the performances, whilst not terrific, are acceptable for a film of this kind.  The only real downer is the screenplay, which is one of the worst of any Hammer film.  The dialogue is so gut-wrenchingly bad that you can almost see the actors choking on their lines as though under the influence of some ancient curse.  The narrative is so clunky and badly structured that no matter how the film was shot and edited it would inevitably have ended up an incoherent mess.   In fact, it’s surprising the film holds together as well as it does, although it cannot hope to compare with Universal’s Mummy films of the 1930s and ’40s.

© James Travers 2009

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