MummysTomb

The Mummy’s Tomb (1942)

Okay so here is something I really never realized until I revisited the series. The original Mummy movie with Karloff really has very little to do with these later installments in the series. This movie, the 3rd in the franchise is a sequel to the previous film, The Mummy’s Hand. That movie pretty much ignores the Karloff classic, except for lifting footage from it. Which all the sequels do to some extent. Not a huge deal, I just found this very interesting and will be something I pay attention to as I check out the rest of the Universal Monster movies.

So this movie picks up years after the events of The Mummy’s Hand. Stephen and Babe are now well to do elderly gentlemen who have no clue that the past is about to come back to haunt them. The High Priest, Andoheb, who Babe had thought he shot and killed, actually survived, as did the mummy of Kharis. Now Andoheb is sending another High Priest to the States with Kharis to exact some revenge. After setting up in a local cemetery the priest, Mehemet Bey, starts to send Kharis out to kill off the survivors from the expedition and their families. But when Bey falls in love with the fiancé of Stephen’s son it leads to his downfall as this gives him and his intentions away. Soon Kharis is trapped with the woman in burning house with some angry locals watching.

I’m torn on this installment. At barely an hour long the movie gets right to business and gets the mummy inspired mayhem going quickly. Unfortunately the first bit of that mayhem is an extended recap of the events of the first movie. I watched these movies in order and realizing the first 10 minutes here were going to be the movie that I just watched was sort of annoying. But once you are past that things do get entertaining and it was fun to see the great George Zucco reprise his role (ever so briefly) of Andoheb. Another thing that was really obvious by watching these movies in order one right after another was the formula. The Mummy is always either trying to get the girl for himself or get the girl for the High Priest. This means that every movie always ends with him carrying off some beautiful young thing with her boyfriend/fiancé in pursuit. I’m not really complaining so much, but it would be cool to see some sort of twist on the formula.

This is the first time that Lon Chaney Jr. would portray the Mummy in a movie. But as is the case with all the Mummy flicks the actor under the bandages isn’t really given much to do. I mean even the Frankenstein monster got some dialogue and grunting now and again. But Chaney does have the movements and shuffles around in a reasonably menacing way. This is also about as good as the Mummy makeup would look in one of the Chaney mummy movies. After this the budgets must have really gotten smaller, because the creature effects just aren’t up to par after this. Not to mention this is the last of the mummy movies to have a really big finish.

In the end this isn’t a bad movie and is worth checking out. It can be had on the Mummy Franchise Collection with the rest of the movies. These Franchise collections are a must for horror fans to have in their collections.

2 ½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer