The Mummy’s Tomb

The Mummy’s Tomb was the third Universal mummy movie and the second to concern Kharis and the Banning expedition.  This time Lon Chaney Jr. took over the role of Kharis and the action is moved to the USA.  Kharis and a high priest are moved to America where they can take vengeance upon the remaining members of the Banning expedition from The Mummy’s Hand as well as their families.  Kharis begins his revenge by killing Steve Banning the leader of the expedition, once more played by Dick Foran.  He moves on to Steve’s sister and Babe Jenson, who conveniently returns to town when he hears about Banning’s death.  Once more the high priest in charge of Kharis falls in love with a woman and kidnaps her.  This time it is the fiance of Banning’s son, John Banning (John Hubbard).

I definitely recall seeing The Mummy’s Hand as a child, because I remember the ending with Kharis trapped on the balcony of a burning house.  For some reason I always remembered it as a Sorority House.  For the record, it is not.  I really enjoyed watching The Mummy’s Tomb again.  It almost made me want to rewatch The Mummy’s Ghost and The Mummy’s Curse just to finally see all five films in the proper order.

I give The Mummy’s Tomb 3 stars.  It was a lot of fun, even if it was a bit repetitive and relied on lots of flashbacks (i.e. stock footage from The Mummy’s Hand).

The Mummy’s Hand

Having worked through the entire Universal Monsters box set, I decided to continue on with the first of the sequels to The Mummy.  After the initial release of the classic Universal Monsters DVD box set, the next round of movies were released on double feature DVDs.  I purchased all of them upon initial release and was very happy that I had when they quickly went out of print.  My biggest disappointment was that no additional double feature DVD releases were planned to finish out the classic Universal Monsters collection.

I had already reviewed the Werewolf of London and She-Wolf of London DVD as well as The Mummy’s Ghost and The Mummy’s Curse DVD, so finishing out the mummy movies made perfect sense.  Surprisingly, I also soon found that I may not have previously seen The Mummy’s Hand.  The Mummy’s Hand starts the series of Kharis films with cowboy actor Tom Tyler stepping into the mummy’s bandages this outing.  When I was a kid, for some reason I always assumed that Tom Tyler would have followed Lon Chaney Jr in the role, not the other way around.  So since The Mummy’s Hand had no Lon Chaney Jr. and probably the worst title in the entire series, it was not one of the films that I obsessed about seeing.  And while most of the mummy movies with Kharis have very similar plots, this was the only one to take place in Egypt and it featured the only mummy death scene that didn’t look familiar to me.

The Mummy’s Hand is much better than I had expected it to be without a Chaney mummy.  I enjoyed it quite a bit including the buddy comedy between Dick Foran’s Steve Banning and Wallace Ford’s Babe Jenson.  The Mummy’s Hand did a great job setting up the future sequels.  I give it 3 1/2 stars.

The Mummy’s Curse

After several days straight of Happy Tree Friends, I decided on Saturday to catch the fifth Universal Mummy movie.  After Universal released the classic monster movies on DVD, they released a batch of the sequels in themed double feature DVDs.  I rushed to FYE when they came out and purchased all 6 of them.  There were two Mummy double features released.  One contained The Mummy’s Hand and The Mummy’s Tomb.  The other one contained The Mummy’s Ghost and The Mummy’s Curse.  Later they ended up releasing all 5 of the Mummy movies together on the second batch of the 2 disc Legacy Collection DVDs.

I knew I hadn’t seen all of the Mummy movies, but I wasn’t sure which ones I had seen as about all I could remember was how the Mummy got killed.  Although I would have figured that I had seen The Mummy’s Curse, surprisingly I didn’t remember it, and it may have been one of the films I hadn’t seen.

The final Lon Chaney Kharis movie takes place in Cajun country where a swamp drainage project has apparently unearthed the Mummy.  A pair of men from the Scripps Museum show up to claim the mummy and his bride from the swamp, but it appears that Kharis may no longer be confined to the swamp as people start turning up dead.  It turns out that one of the museum men may have an ulterior motive as well since he is a member of the Egyptian sect that has been bringing Kharis back to carry out his revenge and find the princess. 

I was pleased to finally get to see this entry in the Mummy series, and actually enjoyed it slightly more than the previous entry.  I still find it hard to believe that the people have such a difficult time escaping from this mummy considering how slow he is.  I give this one 2 1/2 stars

The disc did contain several static bonus features and the theatrical trailer.  The trailer shows parts of the final struggle earning it an 8 1/2 on the Quarantine scale.

The Mummy’s Ghost

As a kid I always enjoyed the Mummy movies.  I think there were several reasons for this.  For one thing Chiller seemed to play the various Mummy sequels with greater frequency than it did the various Dracula and Frankenstein sequels.  I think another reason might have had something to do with the fact that of all the monsters, he seemed the easiest to evade and to destroy.  For this reason he was a less threatening monster than say the Wolfman.  Throw in the fact that there were 4 Mummy sequels and you have another pretty good reason why the Mummy popped up more than the Creature with only 2 sequels to his name, and by popping up more, I saw more of him.

I must confess, I have a difficult time trying to tell the various Mummy movies apart.  The plots seemed to all be fairly similar with the big difference being the method in which the mummy was destroyed in each film.  I remembered one where he burnt up and I remembered one where he walked into the swamp and sank.  I needed a short movie and so I decided to put on the second Mummy Double Feature from the Universal Monsters collection of several years ago.  I had initially planned to watch the original The Mummy, but I couldn’t get to the Universal Monsters box set and didn’t feel like opening up the Mummy Legacy edition yet.  So I popped in the disc and started the first of the two films (the third of the Universal Mummy movies), The Mummy’s Ghost. 

The film opens with a couple of Egyptian priests discussing Kharis and Ananka.  This flows into a professor discussing Kharis with his class and describing the events of the previous film where Kharis was burnt up at the Banning house.  They discuss how he was brought to life and controlled using tana leaves.  The professor reveals that he has the remaining tana leaves from the mummy’s last rampage.  That night he stumbles upon the missing part of his hieroglyphic mystery and begins brewing the potion to summon Kharis.  Despite being burned up at the end of the previous film, Kharis soon walks into the professor’s home looking none the worse for wear.  Also drawn to the professor’s home is a young Egyptian girl named Amina, who just happens to be the love interest of one of the professor’s students, Tom Hervey.  When the professor winds up dead, killed by the mummy, Amina, who blacked out at the edge of the professor’s lawn, becomes a person of interest.

In the meantime Yousef Bey, one of the priests from Egypt, arrives and begins brewing more tana leaves for Kharis.  Kharis in turn begins a murder spree.  The men of the town form watch parties to try to track down the monster.  Amina seems to be more and more intertwined into the plans of Yousef Bey and Kharis, and it soon becomes apparent that she is the reborn version of Princess Ananka.

Yousef Bey is played by a very young looking John Carradine, whom I found almost unrecognizable dressed as the Egyptian priest.  The Mummy is played in this film by Lon Chaney Jr., the king of the monster movie actors.  Chaney played Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman and the Mummy in various films for Universal.  He was probably best known as Larry Talbot, the Wolfman, but I always connected him with Kharis.  This probably goes back to the fact that I mentioned earlier about the Mummy films getting replayed so often.

It turns out that The Mummy’s Ghost was one of the films I had seen as a child.  While I had forgotten much of the movie, the ending with Kharis carrying Ananka/Amina into the swamp remained etched into my mind.  Sadly, my memories of how great the Mummy movies were didn’t hold up as well for me all these years later.  Don’t get me wrong.  I still enjoyed it and I still love the look of Kharis, but as a kid this film would have gotten 5 stars, blowing past the traditional 4 star cap.  This time with nearly 40 years on me, The Mummy’s Ghost is scaled back to 2 1/4 stars.  Maybe it was just a weak link in the series, but I think my tastes may have changed as well.  And maybe I was just too tired to enjoy it or had expectations that were too high.  Maybe I need to do a Mummy marathon some Sunday.