*SPOILER WARNING FOR "THE MUMMY'S TOMB"*
Dear Swift,
Oh, my gosh! I read that comment and liked it. How did I not notice your name?
A friend of mine just gave me his old "Mummy" movies on video – three of the four Kharis films, all but The Mummy's Ghost. I saw Ghost three years ago, but remember little about it, except that it bored me. These movies didn't, but I think I was just more receptive to them.
They're all pretty bad, but there are points of interest. I loved how you pointed out how flabbergastingly weird it was for the hero and the sidekick of Hand to get killed off in the next movie, Tomb. Weird and satisfying. Dick Foran was a stiff, and Wallace Ford was unfunny. The mummy should have killed them in the first movie.
The last film, Curse, probably is the worst, just as you say. But you didn't mention the bravura sequence – it's easily the best scene of the Kharis series and would have been worthy of a classic: the long, silent sequence where Princess Ananka (Virginia Christine, later the Folger's coffee lady) rises out of the mud. Christine is so eerie and poignant, it's too bad she had to follow it up with the rest of the movie. You're much too hard on her performance. She's laughable later, but it's mainly due to the awful dialogue, awfuler plot and someone's hackneyed decision to have her emerge from a pond with a freshly styled hairdo and full makeup. A villager even finds her and exclaims that she's wet, when she's clearly dry. Besides, the drippy leading lady, Kay Harding, makes Christine seem all the more vigorous and exotically beautiful.
That beautiful scene is so heartening. It suggests that someone, presumably the director, cared about what he was doing, however much he may have been hampered by poor actors, a tiny budget, limited time and an awful script. "In this scene," I can imagine him thinking, "I can actually make something out of this crap."
Or, if he was less pretentious: "This will scare the kiddies!"
I just looked him up. Leslie Goodwin. From his filmography, his career looks workmanlike but not distinguished. He made a lot of B-movies until the 1950s, when he switched to TV and directed shows like "Gilligan's Island" and "F-Troop." Curse is probably his best-known film work; it has the most IMDb votes, except for Mary of Scotland, a John Ford movie for which he is uncredited co-director.
Warmest,
... Justin
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Swift-12
20 years ago
I vaguely recall Virginia Christie's entrance from the mudflats. I guess I didn't immerse myself in her immersion because somewhere in the back of my noggin was the query: "Now .... how was it again that this genre got transported from Egypt into the bayou??" Same thing happened with some of the later/lesser vampire flicks. What was Universal thinking? If they were so hell-bent on a creole setting, why not develop a whole new genre that would make more sense and be all the more chilling -- like voodoo cannibals cross-breeding with gap-toothed hillbillies?
What I found most note-worthy about the Kharis-brand of mummy (but hell, these observations were already in my review):
This monster is a lesser version of Karloff's original. The first mummy was Dracula-like and was a super-fiend who manipulated everyone around him, henchmen and victims alike. You could respect a mummy like this -- an undead Phantom of the Opera.
Unfortunately, Kharis is no super-fiend. He's a pathetic lackey, a pawn in the service of a secret priesthood. With Kharis we have a strange morphing of other earlier horror characters: Frankenstein's monster mixed with Fritz the hunchback (or maybe Renfield). He possesses super-human strength, but he's still a toadie.
The other salient point is how ridiculously choreographed the fights are.
"Everyone who goes up against the Mummy desperately needs some fisticuff lessons... all of them rush him spastically with something in hand to bean him, but their timing is way off and they don't even begin to raise the bludgeon until his laconic hand is on their throat. This tired choreography is repeated endlessly, victim after victim."
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J. Spurlin
20 years ago
Dear Swift,
I didn't find the mummy-as-a-lackey angle remarkable because that's the only kind of mummy I've ever seen. I just browsed through the user comments for the Hammer version of "The Mummy," which confirmed my memories - once again, the mummy is a lackey to a malevolent high priest. It seems the Hammer people found more inspiration from the Kharis mummy than the original!
I found it more remarkable that ... *SPOILER FOR "THE MUMMY'S TOMB* ... the leading man and sidekick of the first Kharis movie came back as old men in the second - AND get killed off. And it wasn't just the characters that came back. The original actors came back and put on old-age makeup. It would have been more conventional simply to cast two old men. I'm grateful for details like this. So much of the series is hackneyed that odd details like this are inordinately charming.
The strange logical and chronological inconsistencies between the movies are fun to mock, but they're also depressingly familiar. You get the impression that no one cared enough to make better movies; nor did they think anyone else would care. It's even worse when this happens to movie serials. The godawful "Batman and Robin" from the 1940s features a villain who pretends to need a wheelchair. Later, the villain walks around freely and no one remarks on it. The wheelchair angle was simply forgotten.
Regards,
... Justin
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Mithrandir-Olorin2
16 years ago
They where weird but quite enjoyable.
"It's not about Money
It's about sending a message
Everything Burns"
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