Film Review
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.
© James Travers 2009
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Film Synopsis
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...?
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.