The Mummy, keeps going and going and going
THE MUMMY'S GHOST (1944)
All three of the flicks with Lon Chaney as the Mummy stand up better to re-watching than I expected. Each one has a few memorable scenes and neat touches that make them well worth catching. They're near the top of the second wave of Universal horror films from the 1940s.
Let's see, now. In THE MUMMY'S HAND, it's 1912 and two American archaeologists in Egypt have exacavated the tomb of the Princess Ananka. This annoyed the priests of Karnak, who then revive Ananaka's boyfriend from long ago, the mummy Kharis, to go after these desecrators. It all ends with the chief priest Professor Andoheb being shot full of bullets and Kharis lying on the temple floor burning like a bonfire. (Andoheb got sidetracked by unseemly lust for the pretty young thing who was part of the expedition.)
Thirty years later, in THE MUMMY'S TOMB, we see to our surprise that Andoheb is still alive but in pretty bad shape (George Zucco, made up to look more crippled and wrinkled than the Mummy himself). Being spiteful, he sends oily young Mehemet Bey to America with Kharis to retrieve the body of Ananka and to kill off the Yanks who robbed the tomb. Well, Kharis does manage to strangle both of the loveable old geezers but ends up trapped in a burning mansion as the end credits roll. (The snafu this time was that Mehemet Bey got all hot and bothered by the pretty young gal mixed up in the business, which annoyed Kharis as being unprofessional).
A few years after the events of THE MUMMY'S TOMB, beat-up palsied Andoheb back in Egypt dispatches another high priest to go and see what went wrong. (It sure looked to me like Andoheb died after giving his orders in the previous flick, but maybe he just dozed off and Mehemet was too polite to say anything.) This time, Andoheb chooses an older and presumably more reliable high priest, Yousef Bey. (All right, it's John Carradine in dark make-up! Now we know we're in for some dramatic speeches in a great speaking voice.) Wellll, the same thing happens a third time. The spirit of Ananka has possessed a young college co-ed (an exchange student from Egypt, as it happens) and as Yousef Bey gazes down upon her, a craving for her bod comes upon him and he decides to heck with his vows --- he'll share the tana fluid with her and the two of them will play house somewhere.
Kharis bristles at this. That's Ananka, HIS true love, for whom he was buried alive and whose tomb he's been guarding for three thousand years. He quickly gets rid of Yousef Bey by smacking him out a convenient window and then carries the reincarnated Ananka away. As Fate (or Amon-Ra or whoever) would have it, though, his romance is still doomed. The college girl Amina (whose hair has been turning white since she was first possessed) quickly shrivels and turns into a crone, and she and Kharis both end up sinking into a swamp. Through some inexplicable means, they next turn up in Louisiana in THE MUMMY'S CURSE, although this movie was set in Mapleton, Massachusets. Must be that darn Amon-Ra again.)
Do you think the high priests of Karnak (or Arkam, as the cult is sometimes called) would be well advised to drop their vow of celibacy? Look at all the trouble it causes. If these priests had each brought a tough old battle-axe of a wife along with them to make sure they didn't get led astray by these young America cuties, a lot of this mess could have been avoided.
There are some wonderful sequences in this movie. Crusty old Professor Norman (Frank Reicher) delivers a speech to his students about the horrors that took place in their town of Mapleton not too long ago. When one skeptic suggests that maybe it was just a man in a mummy outfit to keep the legend going, Norman replies sternly, "I saw the creature... I saw him moving around and so did hundreds of other people." (So there, you young whippersnapper!) That night, in his study Professor Norman finally figures out the formula in the hieroglyphs and begins brewing tana leaves in a ceremonial lamp. Sure enough, Kharis sniffs the aroma (hmmm, tana leaves...) and lurches toward the study.
As the Mummy shambles past Amina's window, his shadow falling on her causes her to rise up in a trance and follow. (Even before Ananka's soul enters her, there's something eerie going on with this co-ed. An Egyptian exchange student ending up in the one city in America where a living mummy had been seen? It can't be a coincidence.)
Meanwhile, Kharis has rather unnecessarily throttled poor Norman and chugged down the steaming hot tana fluid. You can tell the Mummy isn't thinking too clearly, as he then turns and lumbers away again without taking the tana leaves with him. (Come to think of it, without anyone brewing the solution for him, what was keeping Kharis alive since the previous movie? Maybe he was just sprawled out deep in the woods in an undead state?) When Amina sees the tattered brute, she faints and later can't remember anything about her sleepwalking...
THE MUMMY'S GHOST is interesting because it's the only time Kharis gets to show genuine emotion. In the other films in the series, he's essentially a zombie assassin sent out to strangle whomever he's told to, and he only rebels when the priests shirk their duties. In this flick, though, he clearly is thinking for himself. When Yousef Bey leads him to the Scripps Museum and shows him the open sarcophagus holding Ananka's remains, Kharis gives a little jolt of recogntion and then leans over to tenderly reach for her. At this very second, though, the spirit (or Ka) of Ananka leaves to enter the body of unsuspecting Amina in her bed miles away. Amina wakes up with a gasp, and the mummy of Ananka somehow evaporates, leaving just empty wrappings.
Despite Yousef's attempts to calm him, Kharis loses his temper and starts tearing the museum up, pausing only long enough to choke a curious guard. As to why Amon-Ra did this, who can say? Just being a divine pain the neck, I guess. Then, when Kharis has lugged Amina/Ananka up to the old mining shack, she awakens to see him gesturing plaintively and she screams in horror. Rejected and dejected, the Mummy goes outside to wait with his head hanging down. It's a minor touch, not really played for pathos, but it does show Kharis is still a conscious being with feelings.
Come to think of it, why make the poor 3000 year old guy trudge up and down those hundreds of steep steps to the mining shack? Why couldn't Yousef Bey find a more accessible hideout? It's bad enough Kharis has to walk everywhere he goes (with a gimpy left leg, no less) and get back before the moon sets. Did any of these priests ever think to rent a car and drive their Mummy somewhere to save time? Nope. Everyone from the gods on down seems determined to make things tough as possible for this monster.
Carradine (playing his role broadly as usual but always fun to watch) and Chaney (trying to give his part some trace of depth) are gven the most screen time, but I also liked Frank Reicher (Captain Englehorn from KING KONG) as the unlucky Professor Norman. Barton MacLane is very cool as the hardheaded Inspector Walgreen who reasonably decides that the way to deal with a killer mummy in your town is to dig a ten foot deep pit, cover it over and then bait the trap with some nice smoking tana leaves. It's great to see the police not just scoff at a supernatural monster but treat it like a dangerous threat.
Unfortunately, the actors playing the pair of doomed lovers drag the movie down a bit for me. Ramsay Ames as Amina is good-looking I suppose but she has little charisma. Especially since the actresses in the other Mummy films were such total babes, she doesn't add much here. And Robert Lowery plays her boyfriend as a complete jerk, rude to everyone but her. There is zero chemistry between them. While I'm at it, the constant yapping of that little mutt Peanuts as he leads everyone on the Mummy's trail in the final reel annoyed me so much that I seriously hoped Kharis would take a second to step down hard on the animal.
Directed by Reginald LeBorg, who thoughtfully took the time to literally make a black cat run across Amina's path as she dazedly walks to her first encounter with the Mummy.
All three of the flicks with Lon Chaney as the Mummy stand up better to re-watching than I expected. Each one has a few memorable scenes and neat touches that make them well worth catching. They're near the top of the second wave of Universal horror films from the 1940s.
Let's see, now. In THE MUMMY'S HAND, it's 1912 and two American archaeologists in Egypt have exacavated the tomb of the Princess Ananka. This annoyed the priests of Karnak, who then revive Ananaka's boyfriend from long ago, the mummy Kharis, to go after these desecrators. It all ends with the chief priest Professor Andoheb being shot full of bullets and Kharis lying on the temple floor burning like a bonfire. (Andoheb got sidetracked by unseemly lust for the pretty young thing who was part of the expedition.)
Thirty years later, in THE MUMMY'S TOMB, we see to our surprise that Andoheb is still alive but in pretty bad shape (George Zucco, made up to look more crippled and wrinkled than the Mummy himself). Being spiteful, he sends oily young Mehemet Bey to America with Kharis to retrieve the body of Ananka and to kill off the Yanks who robbed the tomb. Well, Kharis does manage to strangle both of the loveable old geezers but ends up trapped in a burning mansion as the end credits roll. (The snafu this time was that Mehemet Bey got all hot and bothered by the pretty young gal mixed up in the business, which annoyed Kharis as being unprofessional).
A few years after the events of THE MUMMY'S TOMB, beat-up palsied Andoheb back in Egypt dispatches another high priest to go and see what went wrong. (It sure looked to me like Andoheb died after giving his orders in the previous flick, but maybe he just dozed off and Mehemet was too polite to say anything.) This time, Andoheb chooses an older and presumably more reliable high priest, Yousef Bey. (All right, it's John Carradine in dark make-up! Now we know we're in for some dramatic speeches in a great speaking voice.) Wellll, the same thing happens a third time. The spirit of Ananka has possessed a young college co-ed (an exchange student from Egypt, as it happens) and as Yousef Bey gazes down upon her, a craving for her bod comes upon him and he decides to heck with his vows --- he'll share the tana fluid with her and the two of them will play house somewhere.
Kharis bristles at this. That's Ananka, HIS true love, for whom he was buried alive and whose tomb he's been guarding for three thousand years. He quickly gets rid of Yousef Bey by smacking him out a convenient window and then carries the reincarnated Ananka away. As Fate (or Amon-Ra or whoever) would have it, though, his romance is still doomed. The college girl Amina (whose hair has been turning white since she was first possessed) quickly shrivels and turns into a crone, and she and Kharis both end up sinking into a swamp. Through some inexplicable means, they next turn up in Louisiana in THE MUMMY'S CURSE, although this movie was set in Mapleton, Massachusets. Must be that darn Amon-Ra again.)
Do you think the high priests of Karnak (or Arkam, as the cult is sometimes called) would be well advised to drop their vow of celibacy? Look at all the trouble it causes. If these priests had each brought a tough old battle-axe of a wife along with them to make sure they didn't get led astray by these young America cuties, a lot of this mess could have been avoided.
There are some wonderful sequences in this movie. Crusty old Professor Norman (Frank Reicher) delivers a speech to his students about the horrors that took place in their town of Mapleton not too long ago. When one skeptic suggests that maybe it was just a man in a mummy outfit to keep the legend going, Norman replies sternly, "I saw the creature... I saw him moving around and so did hundreds of other people." (So there, you young whippersnapper!) That night, in his study Professor Norman finally figures out the formula in the hieroglyphs and begins brewing tana leaves in a ceremonial lamp. Sure enough, Kharis sniffs the aroma (hmmm, tana leaves...) and lurches toward the study.
As the Mummy shambles past Amina's window, his shadow falling on her causes her to rise up in a trance and follow. (Even before Ananka's soul enters her, there's something eerie going on with this co-ed. An Egyptian exchange student ending up in the one city in America where a living mummy had been seen? It can't be a coincidence.)
Meanwhile, Kharis has rather unnecessarily throttled poor Norman and chugged down the steaming hot tana fluid. You can tell the Mummy isn't thinking too clearly, as he then turns and lumbers away again without taking the tana leaves with him. (Come to think of it, without anyone brewing the solution for him, what was keeping Kharis alive since the previous movie? Maybe he was just sprawled out deep in the woods in an undead state?) When Amina sees the tattered brute, she faints and later can't remember anything about her sleepwalking...
THE MUMMY'S GHOST is interesting because it's the only time Kharis gets to show genuine emotion. In the other films in the series, he's essentially a zombie assassin sent out to strangle whomever he's told to, and he only rebels when the priests shirk their duties. In this flick, though, he clearly is thinking for himself. When Yousef Bey leads him to the Scripps Museum and shows him the open sarcophagus holding Ananka's remains, Kharis gives a little jolt of recogntion and then leans over to tenderly reach for her. At this very second, though, the spirit (or Ka) of Ananka leaves to enter the body of unsuspecting Amina in her bed miles away. Amina wakes up with a gasp, and the mummy of Ananka somehow evaporates, leaving just empty wrappings.
Despite Yousef's attempts to calm him, Kharis loses his temper and starts tearing the museum up, pausing only long enough to choke a curious guard. As to why Amon-Ra did this, who can say? Just being a divine pain the neck, I guess. Then, when Kharis has lugged Amina/Ananka up to the old mining shack, she awakens to see him gesturing plaintively and she screams in horror. Rejected and dejected, the Mummy goes outside to wait with his head hanging down. It's a minor touch, not really played for pathos, but it does show Kharis is still a conscious being with feelings.
Come to think of it, why make the poor 3000 year old guy trudge up and down those hundreds of steep steps to the mining shack? Why couldn't Yousef Bey find a more accessible hideout? It's bad enough Kharis has to walk everywhere he goes (with a gimpy left leg, no less) and get back before the moon sets. Did any of these priests ever think to rent a car and drive their Mummy somewhere to save time? Nope. Everyone from the gods on down seems determined to make things tough as possible for this monster.
Carradine (playing his role broadly as usual but always fun to watch) and Chaney (trying to give his part some trace of depth) are gven the most screen time, but I also liked Frank Reicher (Captain Englehorn from KING KONG) as the unlucky Professor Norman. Barton MacLane is very cool as the hardheaded Inspector Walgreen who reasonably decides that the way to deal with a killer mummy in your town is to dig a ten foot deep pit, cover it over and then bait the trap with some nice smoking tana leaves. It's great to see the police not just scoff at a supernatural monster but treat it like a dangerous threat.
Unfortunately, the actors playing the pair of doomed lovers drag the movie down a bit for me. Ramsay Ames as Amina is good-looking I suppose but she has little charisma. Especially since the actresses in the other Mummy films were such total babes, she doesn't add much here. And Robert Lowery plays her boyfriend as a complete jerk, rude to everyone but her. There is zero chemistry between them. While I'm at it, the constant yapping of that little mutt Peanuts as he leads everyone on the Mummy's trail in the final reel annoyed me so much that I seriously hoped Kharis would take a second to step down hard on the animal.
Directed by Reginald LeBorg, who thoughtfully took the time to literally make a black cat run across Amina's path as she dazedly walks to her first encounter with the Mummy.