The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964) - film review

Egypt, 1900.  An archaeological team led by the eminent Egyptologist Dr Dubois has uncovered the lost tomb of the pharaoh Ra-Antef.  The expeditionary party includes Dubois’ daughter Annette and the archaeologists John Bray and Sir Giles Dalrymple.  Shortly after Dubois is murdered by Bedouins, a delegation from the Egyptian government appears to negotiate the retention of the ancient Egyptian artefacts in the country.   A wealthy American impresario, Alexander King, outbids the Egyptians so that he can parade the artefacts as a travelling sideshow.  The prize exhibit will be the mummy of the pharaoh.  King hopes to profit from an ancient curse which states that anyone who looks upon the face of the mummy will die.  Shortly after the artefacts have been shipped to England, the mummy goes missing.  Mr King isn’t too pleased when he is reunited with it because it immediately proceeds to strangle the life out of him.  Meanwhile, Annette has fallen for the seductive charms of Adam Beauchamp, an amateur Egyptologist who appears to know more about the subject than she does.  Adam reveals that he is in fact Be, the younger brother of Ra-Antef, who, in return for killing the pharaoh, was condemned to walk the Earth for eternity.  It is he who has brought the mummy back to life, by reciting the inscription on a ancient stone amulet.  Adam knows that only Ra-Antef can release him from the curse of endless life.  But will his brother be in the mood to oblige him after all this time...?

In stark contrast to their successful revival of Dracula and Frankenstein, Hammer’s attempts to resurrect the third of the great Gothic horror icons, the Mummy, seem to have been constantly blighted by poor scripts, a lack of ambition and production difficulties.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the studio’s second Mummy film, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, which even by the standards of Hammer is pretty unedifying stuff.

The film’s Achilles’ heel (as in so many of Hammer’s horror films) is its muddled morass that masquerades as a script.  Anyone who can make sense of the convoluted mess that is the plot deserves a medal of some kind.  Michael Carreras, writing under the pseudonym Henry Younger, takes the ingredients from Hammer’s previous The Mummy (1959), puts them through the intellectual equivalent of a food blender, and the mangled puree that spews out the other end is pretty well the script for this film.  Of course, the real difficulty lies in the concept of the Mummy.  There is basically just one story: archaeologists open up a tomb, find a sarcophagus containing Mr Mummy, some nasty piece of work brings said Mummy back to life, Mummy starts killing people and then meets a nasty end.  Only when Hammer departed from this tried and tested formula did they come up with a Mummy film of any real interest, that film being the bizarre but inventive Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971).

It’s a pity that The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb fares so badly on the script front because, in every other department, it isn’t quite so bad.  Visually, the film is actually quite impressive, particularly in the later sequences when the Mummy goes on a killer rampage in an authentic recreation of the fog-shrouded London of Sherlock Holmes.  Alas, without a star of the calibre of Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee, the story fails to take hold and is a pretty aimless affair, plodding blindly along like the film’s monster. Perhaps if more thought had gone into the script, the characters might have had more of an impression.  In the end, we just don’t care what happens to them.

The film is to be noted for its visceral horror which, for this period, was pretty daring for Hammer, with hands being lopped off willy-nilly and poor George Pastell having his head crushed under foot by Plaster of Paris Man (the monster formerly known as the Mummy).  Definitely not one of Hammer’s better offerings, but, with its creepy Gothic atmosphere and some gruesome shocks along the way, it just about mananges to hold our attention, although we clearly had much more fun with Dracula and Frankenstein.

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