The Mummy series is last not only on our list, but the last chronologically speaking as well; its final film, released in 1955, was the last breath of Universal's first wave of horror films. From here Universal would explore other options (they'd already started by the time of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948), and now The Mummy is to be remade as part of the new Universal Horror Shared Universe that is ostensibly in production.
On a more personal note, the Mummy series was the one I was looking forward to the most, simply because it was the one I knew the least about! Let's see if the wait was worth it...
(Part One of this Retrospective, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four)
The Mummy (1932):
On a more personal note, the Mummy series was the one I was looking forward to the most, simply because it was the one I knew the least about! Let's see if the wait was worth it...
(Part One of this Retrospective, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four)
The Mummy (1932):
"Boo! Hiss!" some of you may say. "The Mummy isn't really part of the Universal canon! The Mummy series is about Kharis, while The Mummy tells the story of the mummy Imhotep!" Well, as I said in the last entry, technically none of the Mummy films are expressly canon to the Universal horror-verse, being only linked by the tenuous thread of Abbott and Costello. At the same time, I feel like it would not only be pedantic to avoid watching The Mummy before checking out The Mummy's Hand, but it would take away the chance to have some fun, too.
We open in the desert near Cairo in 1921. Three men, Sir Joseph Whemple, Dr. Muller, and Ralph Norton are excavating the tomb of the Egyptian high priest Imhotep, who was apparently buried alive for sacrilege. Dr. Muller appears to be a student of the occult (sharing actor Edward Van Sloan with Dr. van Helsing, and basically doing it exactly the same), warning the two not to open the box they discovered near Imhotep's sarcophagus. Not only does Ralph do exactly that when the other two step away, but he reads off the ancient scroll, the Scroll of Thoth, that he finds within, with the expected consequence of awakening Imhotep. Ralph is driven mad and Sir Joseph abandons the site. But twelve years later, Sir Whemple's son Frank has come back to the camp to continue his father's studies. He is abetted in this by an Egyptian scholar named Ardath Bey, whom the audience is supposed to notice bears a striking resemblance to Imhotep after a shower and makeover--he leads Frank to the tomb of the ancient princess Ankh-es-en-Amon. When she is excavated and carted off to the British Museum, Ardath Bey ingratiates himself with Sir Whemple so that he may stay in the museum overnight, allowing him to perform a ritual of some kind to the mummy of Ankh-es-en-Amon. This begins to stir feelings in one of Dr. Muller's patients, a woman named Helen, with whom Frank begins to fall in love--Helen is the reincarnation of Ankh-es-en-Amon, and she is drawn to Ardath Bey. It was a forbidden relationship with Ankh-es-en-Amon that resulted in Imhotep's premature mummification--or at least, he was sad when she died and tried to use the Scroll of Thoth to bring her corpse back to life. (It's not really specified if she returned this sentiment in life.) By the time we've learned this, we already know that his power is no joke, apparently crushing Sir Joseph's heart. Next he has his eyes set on Frank, so that no man can interfere with his relationship with his resurrected bride...
I've sort of always thought that mummies were cool, and I think I have to conclude that the only reason why I feel that way is because I saw this when I was a kid. Sure, I clearly remember falling asleep, but watching it as an adult, it's not that boring. It has a slow pace, but I've been watching these movies for awhile and I'm used to it by now. The mystery of who the Mummy is and what he wants unfolds at a comfortable and rational pace, and we are kept in some classic suspense that Hitchcock himself would be proud of: I've already mentioned the fact that only we, the viewers, can know that the man who meets Frank to lead him to the Princess' tomb is probably Imhotep in disguise, so we feel horror upon making that recognition since we already know from that haunting opening scene that Imhotep is supposed to scare us shitless. Leading on from that, there's the bit where Ardath Bey dismisses himself from Sir Joseph's office when he realizes the two are not alone--since we know he's Imhotep and Imhotep is scary, we can assume that Ardath Bey's sudden resentment of company is due to the fact that he was going to kill Sir Joseph. But since this movie is good--and good movies make us care about them--why should we care if Imhotep does kill these people?
That leads us to a question you may be asking: how does this movie treat the archaeologist characters? The excavations of real-life mummy sites were oftentimes more disrespectful than the grave-robbers who cracked some of those tombs over the centuries before Westerners started poking their noses in the cemetery-spaces of brown people. One man's scientific preservation is another's theft, and I've read enough to be wary of how exactly certain museums acquired their artifacts. (Never trust an institution that has bought and will buy stolen art off the Nazis, that's what I always say.) Well, surprisingly, the movie is relatively sensitive to such things. They may not care enough to have the Egyptian nobles be played by, y'know, actual Africans, but Helen is notably offended by Frank's glee in his ghoulish description of plundering the tomb. Indeed, his talk of the act doesn't paint him in a heroic light, as he focuses on her treasure above all her other possessions, and it doesn't sound anything but profane when he talks about removing her bandages. Intriguingly, removing Frank as the hero (as the movie would lead us to believe he is, as he is the designated Young White Male Love Interest) shifts protagonist status to Helen instead, which is apt, as she is ultimately the one responsible for stopping Imhotep. Her disgust over Frank's assault on a sacred place reinforces to us modern viewers that she's the hero, and if her being the one to destroy the Mummy was meant to be a sign on behalf of the filmmakers that she is the hero, then that means they take a stance against grave-robbing as well. Hell, this even fits into early Universal's anti-science motif, as Frank and others justify their taking of tomb artifacts back to Britain as being FOR SCIENCE!!!!
Overall, The Mummy is an impressively good horror film, being the most successful at actually scaring me of the five series-openers. I can see where my fascination came from.
We open in the desert near Cairo in 1921. Three men, Sir Joseph Whemple, Dr. Muller, and Ralph Norton are excavating the tomb of the Egyptian high priest Imhotep, who was apparently buried alive for sacrilege. Dr. Muller appears to be a student of the occult (sharing actor Edward Van Sloan with Dr. van Helsing, and basically doing it exactly the same), warning the two not to open the box they discovered near Imhotep's sarcophagus. Not only does Ralph do exactly that when the other two step away, but he reads off the ancient scroll, the Scroll of Thoth, that he finds within, with the expected consequence of awakening Imhotep. Ralph is driven mad and Sir Joseph abandons the site. But twelve years later, Sir Whemple's son Frank has come back to the camp to continue his father's studies. He is abetted in this by an Egyptian scholar named Ardath Bey, whom the audience is supposed to notice bears a striking resemblance to Imhotep after a shower and makeover--he leads Frank to the tomb of the ancient princess Ankh-es-en-Amon. When she is excavated and carted off to the British Museum, Ardath Bey ingratiates himself with Sir Whemple so that he may stay in the museum overnight, allowing him to perform a ritual of some kind to the mummy of Ankh-es-en-Amon. This begins to stir feelings in one of Dr. Muller's patients, a woman named Helen, with whom Frank begins to fall in love--Helen is the reincarnation of Ankh-es-en-Amon, and she is drawn to Ardath Bey. It was a forbidden relationship with Ankh-es-en-Amon that resulted in Imhotep's premature mummification--or at least, he was sad when she died and tried to use the Scroll of Thoth to bring her corpse back to life. (It's not really specified if she returned this sentiment in life.) By the time we've learned this, we already know that his power is no joke, apparently crushing Sir Joseph's heart. Next he has his eyes set on Frank, so that no man can interfere with his relationship with his resurrected bride...
I've sort of always thought that mummies were cool, and I think I have to conclude that the only reason why I feel that way is because I saw this when I was a kid. Sure, I clearly remember falling asleep, but watching it as an adult, it's not that boring. It has a slow pace, but I've been watching these movies for awhile and I'm used to it by now. The mystery of who the Mummy is and what he wants unfolds at a comfortable and rational pace, and we are kept in some classic suspense that Hitchcock himself would be proud of: I've already mentioned the fact that only we, the viewers, can know that the man who meets Frank to lead him to the Princess' tomb is probably Imhotep in disguise, so we feel horror upon making that recognition since we already know from that haunting opening scene that Imhotep is supposed to scare us shitless. Leading on from that, there's the bit where Ardath Bey dismisses himself from Sir Joseph's office when he realizes the two are not alone--since we know he's Imhotep and Imhotep is scary, we can assume that Ardath Bey's sudden resentment of company is due to the fact that he was going to kill Sir Joseph. But since this movie is good--and good movies make us care about them--why should we care if Imhotep does kill these people?
That leads us to a question you may be asking: how does this movie treat the archaeologist characters? The excavations of real-life mummy sites were oftentimes more disrespectful than the grave-robbers who cracked some of those tombs over the centuries before Westerners started poking their noses in the cemetery-spaces of brown people. One man's scientific preservation is another's theft, and I've read enough to be wary of how exactly certain museums acquired their artifacts. (Never trust an institution that has bought and will buy stolen art off the Nazis, that's what I always say.) Well, surprisingly, the movie is relatively sensitive to such things. They may not care enough to have the Egyptian nobles be played by, y'know, actual Africans, but Helen is notably offended by Frank's glee in his ghoulish description of plundering the tomb. Indeed, his talk of the act doesn't paint him in a heroic light, as he focuses on her treasure above all her other possessions, and it doesn't sound anything but profane when he talks about removing her bandages. Intriguingly, removing Frank as the hero (as the movie would lead us to believe he is, as he is the designated Young White Male Love Interest) shifts protagonist status to Helen instead, which is apt, as she is ultimately the one responsible for stopping Imhotep. Her disgust over Frank's assault on a sacred place reinforces to us modern viewers that she's the hero, and if her being the one to destroy the Mummy was meant to be a sign on behalf of the filmmakers that she is the hero, then that means they take a stance against grave-robbing as well. Hell, this even fits into early Universal's anti-science motif, as Frank and others justify their taking of tomb artifacts back to Britain as being FOR SCIENCE!!!!
Overall, The Mummy is an impressively good horror film, being the most successful at actually scaring me of the five series-openers. I can see where my fascination came from.
The Mummy's Hand (1940):
The Mummy's Hand is a pseudo-remake of The Mummy, and while the debate over the quality of remakes over originals has found compelling arguments on both sides that have left me a cold centrist, I can easily say that if you wanted to rule that movies should never be remade, even partially, this film is solid proof that remakes are shitshows, pure and simple.
We open with a man named Andoheb meeting with his father, the High Priest of Karnak, who seeks to pass on his ancient knowledge. He tells him the story of Kharis, a priest of ancient Egypt, and the movie almost immediately derails itself by telling Kharis' story almost entirely through stock footage stolen from The Mummy. Yes, Kharis' story is basically the same, with Ankh-es-en-Amon replaced with a princess named Ananka, and the Scroll of Thoth replaced with the sacred tana leaves, but that's no excuse--Kharis actor Tom Tyler looks nothing like Boris Karloff, and though they strain to hide his face, it's easy to see that that's Boris Karloff. Anyway, it is the sacred tana leaves, brewed into a juice, that have carried out what appears to be the central goal of the Karnak cult, which is to keep Kharis' mummy alive. Three leaves brewed will sustain his life, but nine leaves will give him the power of movement. After introducing this, we meet our heroes for this movie, a loose cannon archeologist named Steve Banning and his comedy relief Brooklyn sidekick Babe. They are unbearable pricks and spend most of their introduction showing this, with Babe in particular demonstrating that some actors really are completely blind and deaf to the barest concept of humor. They, along with a scientist named Dr. Petrie and a woman of some occupation named Marta (who naturally becomes the Necessary Heterosexual Female Love Interest, so people are not suspicious of two men who keep close company with one calling the other "babe"), travel to the tomb of Ananka, where Andoheb awakens Kharis. Ultimately he wants the Mummy to capture Marta because he has fallen in love with her, and plans to make she and himself immortal, Kharis' own destiny of destroying the profaners of Ananka's tomb be damned. Unfortunately none of this comes to pass, and all of the designated protagonists live when Babe guns down Andoheb and Banning burns Kharis to a true death.
The lack of effort put into this movie, I think, can be placed on an obvious detail I noticed while watching. Universal evidently felt like they had mined the Mummy concept clean in their 1932 effort, and nonetheless sallied forth by making the opening few minutes of the film out of stock footage from The Mummy and fusing in elements from Dracula. Think about it: Kharis is a vampire. The tana tea is a parallel to blood; he can only operate under the light of a full moon (thus ruling out walking in daylight for him); and he begins the film as a relatively inert creature in a creaking tomb who must be fed. His presence is even highlighted by wolves, described as nothing less than "the children of the night"! Even if you believe that the Cult of Karnak and Dr. Andoheb are original additions, they essentially represent Dracula's Romani servants from Bram Stoker's original novel of Dracula. Throw in a heaping dash of the tonal problems from the Invisible Man series with some horrible comic relief, and you've got something nearly as bad as The Invisible Woman. Because there are still some interesting makeup effects, good performances, and well-used atmospheric shading, it's not irredeemable, but I would never watch it again. I can't believe they took a monster as neat as a Mummy and reduced it to a cheap sideways clone of one of their most poorly-executed monsters. I can only hope for improvement.
The Mummy's Tomb (1942):
If it was ludicrous for The Mummy's Hand to open with stock footage of The Mummy, then surely it's just straight-up moronic for The Mummy's Tomb to open with stock footage from The Mummy's Hand! No joke, the first twelve minutes of The Mummy's Tomb's 59 minute runtime is comprised of little but opening credits and stock footage. An older Steve Banning--probably about thirty years older if the appearance of his son, John, is any indication--tells his family the story of Kharis, which seemingly justifies this borrowing. After this we see an elderly Andoheb, evidently more bullet-proof than the previous film let on, mirroring the ritual he had with father in the prior film as he passes on control of the Cult of Karnak to a younger man named Mehemet Bey (played at least by a Turkish actor this time, Turhan Bey). It's not long before Mehemet Bey revives Kharis--who survived that all-consuming fire just fine, wrappings and all--to destroy those who profaned the tomb of Ananka. This means that Kharis not only kills Steve Banning, but his friend Babe as well! And Babe's death is long and drawn out. Unfortunately the filmmakers decided that doing something like showing the progression of generations in a franchise was too interesting, so we have Mehemet Bey fall in love with John Banning's fiancee Isobel and kidnap her to make the two of them immortal, in defiance of Kharis' wishes. (It's not like this repetition of history goes without comment--Kharis is clearly taken aback by the prospect of his present master following the fate of his first.) Somehow this all leads to the formation of an angry mob--did I mention this movie is set in Massachusetts?--with literal pitchforks and torches, which go on a hunt to burn the Mummy. Mehemet Bey is shot and killed by a minor character who had like maybe two scenes beforehand, and John Banning kills Kharis with fire. Then John and Isobel are married, as if we cared, represented in the film by a newspaper showing a photo of the two characters standing next to each other.
Everything about The Mummy's Tomb is completely pointless, beginning with the title. Only in flashbacks to The Mummy's Hand do we see Kharis' Tomb in any way. There is no genuine conflict because the characters spend most of their time trying to find out who's been killing people, but we already know who is it because they just fucking show us Kharis killing these people right away. Similarly, the film, which again is shockingly brief, jumps between story threads so frantically that there's no character development whatsover; the only reason why we care about anyone in the film is that they are opposed to Kharis and Mehemet Bey, and because they are related to characters from The Mummy's Hand, who I hated anyway. Piling on even more shit are scenes which appear to have been left in the film by accident. How do you explain the scene where Kharis rustles some bushes near a couple making out in a parked car (see how goddamn old this trope is?) only for said couple to drive off without incident, never to be seen again? At least I think we never see them again, and I'm pretty sure they aren't John and Isobel. Even if they are, I've already explained why I don't care.
And whereas The Mummy's Hand was willing to make Kharis a metaphorical tana-leaf vampire out of a lack of creativity as far as escaping the Dracula mold went, The Mummy's Tomb's use of an angry mob shows that Universal was desperate to hang onto audiences by reminding them of Frankenstein. It's the same sort of obvious commercialism that afflicts so many of these films--I know I shouldn't be surprised, because these are sequels to movies that generally weren't very good anyway, but for The Mummy's Tomb to be even cheaper and lazier than The Mummy's Hand still feels like a harsh blow. I'm willing to give this movie credit because it was okay with killing off the meatheaded prick of an Indiana Jones wannabe and his mutant Lou Costello clone foisted on us in Hand, as old men no less, and in pretty drawn-out and horrible ways. Normally I find that killing the protagonists of a previous film in a series is done for crappy shock value, and that's probably why it was done here, but it was still pretty dang satisfying.
The Mummy's Ghost (1944):
We begin once again with an elderly Andoheb passing on the duties of Karnak (now called Arkam in a Vasaria/Frankenstein sort of thing) to a man named Yousef Bey, played by John Carradine. This time there is no stock footage but we need the story of Kharis and Ananka and their cursed love again. I'm surprised the filmmakers managed to remember that story accurately, when they couldn't recall that Andoheb is supposed to be pretty conclusively dead twice over now. Yousef Bey vows to fulfill the will of Kharis and of the gods of Egypt and all that stuff. We then go to a class taught by Professor Norman, a character from The Mummy's Tomb who I didn't bother mentioning because I didn't remember him. He is apparently teaching archeology and history when he explains what happened to him in the last film, and how he found out that the living dead are real--when he ends the class, he says, "Next time we'll be covering something more scholarly and curricular than living mummies." Can you imagine attending a class that reveals that there is/was a force on this Earth that could bring people back from the dead and keep them alive for centuries and then having to go back to memorizing dates and writing essays on the patterns on bits of pottery? Anyway...Kharis and Yousef Bey go to steal Ananka's mummy, but it collapses to dust, which I guess means that her soul has moved on to a new body. Hm...perhaps it's that Egyptian girl Amina, who keeps having fainting spells near the scene of Kharis' murders? She's really important, after all! She's the possible love interest of Tom, one of Professor Norman's students. Yeah, that's real important, especially now that the professor is dead. (His murder lacks even the dull amusement of his being an annoying character who deserved death.) Now, once Yousef Bey has Kharis kidnap Amina, would you believe that he falls in love with her and seeks to make she and himself immortal so they can live in eternal marriage? I guess now that Ananka's reincarnation is the girl on the line, and Ananka was Kharis' girlfriend, Kharis is willing to be the one to kill his own disciple. And because each of the Mummy films must rip off another Universal film (with this one already having taken the reincarnation plot from The Mummy), we have a sad twist ending, where the Generic White Male is left sans girlfriend, just like in Son of Dracula. Aw.
Okay, backing things up a bit on that ending: it is actually a little shocking that they'd be willing to condemn the female lead of the film to such a horrible death (which now that I realize it is the same fate as the Monster and Dr. Niemann in House of Frankenstein). But it's not that Amina drowns in quicksand with Kharis, but that she apparently ages rapidly at his touch, so Ananka's lost time can catch up with her. So by the time she and her past-life lover descend into their boggy new tomb (meaning that in a way this means that Kharis wins, since re-entombing himself and Ananka was his goal), she has aged to a mummy herself. It's a remarkably savage image for such an otherwise blunted movie, but what follows wrenches it a little bit: there's a voiceover line that warns that those who invoke the wrath of the gods must suffer a cruel and horrible death. At what point did Amina do anything to invoke the wraths of the gods?! As far as I saw, she was the victim here. I have no idea how to read this, beyond the obvious fact that They Just Didn't Care. Hell, even John Carradine is flat in this, and John Carradine has saved and/or benefited basically every movie I've seen him in. Where it not for the distance they were willing to go for one last shock with Amina's death, and for the fact that it doesn't waste an egregious amount of its runtime being stock footage (actually the movie appears to be stock footage-free, meaning that maybe they finally learned something), I would be willing to condemn this movie just as I did its two predecessors. We must be grateful for small mercies.
The Mummy's Curse (1944):
The Mummy's Curse is cursed to yet another rocky start, though it is mercifully not the same rocky start as the other Mummy films. We begin in a swampy area populated by Cajuns and Creoles, who oppose a corporate plan to drain the swamp containing the bodies of Kharis and Ananka. Wait, we're in Louisiana? Weren't the previous movies set in Massachusetts? And wait, now they're saying that the two Egyptians were entombed in the swamp twenty-five years ago, meaning that The Mummy's Ghost is set in 1919...and The Mummy's Hand is set in the early 1890s?!? Bullshit! But at least it isn't opening with stock footage or a training session for the next Priest of Arkam. That comes later, after we're introduced to our two archeologists, James Halsey and Ilzor Zandaab, who have come looking for the Mummy and put more stock in the local superstitions about the Curse of Kharis than the company operators. Of course, because Dr. Zandaab is Egyptian, we learn he is really the High Priest of Arkam, and as soon as he is introduced he wanders off to the conveniently-nearly abandoned monastery...where his student Ragheb has brought the Mummy of Kharis. Now we come to the reciting of the duties of Arkam (borrowed nearly line-for-line from the other movies), complete with stock footage pried from The Mummy, now looking more aged than ever. (It's almost like you shouldn't reuse footage from twelve-year-old films or something.) Kharis, renewed by tana brew, goes on a killing spree in an attempt to retrieve Ananka, whose Mummy also wandered from the swamps. Exposure to sunlight, however, has turned Ananka back to a living girl, though she seems to have the mind of Ananka and not poor Amina, whose body she's hijacking. So surprise, Ananka actually gets a little agency in this film, as she's decided upon gaining new life that she's not terribly interested in letting Kharis manhandle her body anymore. Swimming in all this is another subplot where Ragheb falls in love with Betty, one of the workers on the swamp-draining project, but Dr. Zandaab wisely reminds his pupil that selfish sexual interest and having Kharis as a coworker rarely mix (even though Kharis isn't interested in the girl the Priest is after this time!). So Ragheb kills Zandaab, and Kharis, in trying to kill Ragheb, kills himself along with his intended victim by breaking down the monastery and burying them alive. This causes Ananka to turn back into a Mummy--so much for agency--and Dr. Halsey, who has basically not been a character at all in this film getting banging rights to Betty over some of the most brainlessly sexist ending dialogue I've ever heard.
You may notice that I seem hopeful at the start of that synopsis, suggesting that this movie only has a bad start by its decision to mutilate the timeline of its series. Indeed, I was praying that the divergence from the ordinary formula, beginning with the passing on of the Priesthood of Karnak/Arkam, leading into Mummy murders for the sake of Ananka, leading into the Priest fucking things up and being killed by the heroes/Kharis, would be a consistent one. While the movie does break away from that formula, it embellishes it only slightly, moving some incidents around in the film and making it two Priests of Karnak instead of one. It doesn't matter--it's too brief to establish characters, and absolutely no effort is put into making it scary. I'm no longer counting novelty as a valid excuse for sparing a movie.
As this series has gone on, I've desperately scrambled to come up for any sort of justification of the existence of Kharis, beyond an interest in Egyptology when the Mummy films were made. Again, he is basically a slow-moving Egyptian Dracula, and even that defining feature gets sanded down as time goes on. He then starts to embody what the Frankenstein's Monster became, the supernatural hitman. Interestingly, Kharis is a hitman in his own quest--he's controlled by a higher power, but the Priests of Karnak use their control over him to attain what are ultimately his goals. Because the Priests of Karnak are apparent servants of Ananka, there must be a revenge angle against Kharis in using Kharis to retrieve and re-entomb Ananka, as Kharis was turned into a Mummy for trying to bring Ananka back to life, which was viewed as a heinous crime. So the Priests and Kharis are naturally going to have an antagonistic relationship--they need each other so they can find spiritual peace, but one is surely aware that he is just a glorified thug, and the other views said thug as a trespasser on what he holds sacred. But the fact that I've had to mull this in my mind for four movies now when this should be more clearly explored in the movies themselves shows that the sequels to The Mummy's Hand were generally flukes, born out of a desire to make money for than anything else, and I won't even start on the notion of people actually being fans of these movies. In my mind, I can't understand in any way why these movies are remembered with the same fondness and prominence as the Frankenstein or Invisible Man series.
What I'm forced to conclude is that Universal was desperate to replicate the success of The Mummy but never applied logic to the process of making a new Mummy character. After all, what are Kharis and his Priests of Karnak if not Imhotep split into two characters? You have the slow murderous Mummy and the mysterious well-spoken sorcerer. Together, there is effective menace--a physical presence in the conflict and a mystical one as well. But none of the Priests we see have any character traits aside from "evil, Egyptian, and horny," and Kharis, having had his tongue cut out when he was mummified, never gets any character development, instead just being a foot-dragging strangle-murderer. There are many more better movies featuring evil horny people and strangle-murderers than this. By basing the series on a Mummy that exudes no threat or interest, it's no wonder Universal shit the bed so hard with these four. I've worried about the coming of Abbott and Costello--because I'm not sure there's anything at all for them to parody.
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955):
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy is the last official Universal Horror film related to the original five franchises, and the second-to-last movie that Abbott and Costello made together. One can't expect the dignity of what we started with--long absent is The Mummy, along with Frankenstein and The Wolf Man. But fortunately, the movie is at least a little funny, and it is significantly superior to all the Mummy films bar the 1932 original, so it's not an awful end by any means.
Bud and Lou are in Egypt attending some weird, horrible dinner theatre when they overhear that the famous Dr. Zoomer is looking for two men to join him on an expedition to the Tomb of Princess Ara, which he has discovered by examining the Mummy of Klaris. (Yes, that's Klaris, not Kharis, and he seems to be a distinct Mummy.) Also overhearing this are the Followers of Klaris, who seek to regain their Mummy master's stolen body and stop people from reaching the Tomb of Ara. They retrieve Klaris, but fail to obtain the medallion that could leading clever explorers to the Tomb. Our explorers aren't terribly clever, but after some run-ins with the vicious treasure-hunter Madame Rontru they find their way to the Tomb as Rontru's prisoners. The leader of the Followers of Klaris, Semu, continues to hunt Bud and Lou to get the medallion, while Rontru's men decide to overthrow the cult by disguising one of their number as Klaris and placing him in Klaris' sarcophagus. But Bud and Lou get the same idea, knocking out and replacing the replacement. So there are three mummies together at the end when Madame Rontru's dynamite, wielded by an unknowing Klaris, blows up the Tomb and reveals the treasure of Princess Ara. Using this treasure Bud and Lou turn what's left of the Tomb into a nightclub, somehow receiving no complaints from academic and governmental boards for this desecration of a significant historical site.
I'd like this examination by reaffirming what I said at the beginning: this is better than all of the previous Mummy movies that came before (except the original), possibly combined. It has a much larger budget and is shot and acted better. It has momentum, action, characters with traits, purpose, and multiple sets and settings, which is more than I can say of The Mummy's Hand and all the films that followed it. What is more--and this hurts the film a little bit--the Mummy is actually an effective monster. Klaris is much more mobile than Kharis, and his makeup is vastly superior; in a true horror film, the distorted moan-screams he keeps making could actually be scary. Making Kharis mute was a terrible decision. Yes, silent monsters can definitely be terrifying. But a Mummy seems proper when it's gibbering horribly as it lurches towards you, assuming you want to take the lurching approach. Klaris also has a genuine cult at his fingertips, one which reveres him rather than treats him like a hitman, and which consists of much more than two members at a time. (Seriously, are the Priests of Karnak Sith Lords or something? You can hire more guys, you know!) Because this is a good comedy, not everything is played for laughs, so we get to see the cult's rituals, and it's a nicely atmospheric scene. Never mind the fact that the ritual sequence betrays that the filmmakers don't know the difference between Egypt and India--not only is there a gag with an Indian rope trick before the ritual scene, but during it the Followers of Klaris dance in a distinctly Hindu-like fashion, even doing the multi-armed Kali dance that shows up in so many Western films. Unlike The Mummy's Hand, however, humor concerning "Eastern" cultures is not unleashed with the intent of degrading and belittling those cultures. It's just nice to see effort put into the mythology of the Mummy, when the last time that was actually bothered with was 23 years ago.
And again, it is pretty funny. Sure, even I can tell that Abbott and Costello are recycling old material, but I've never heard it before and I liked it. Since 1951, Abbott has become a better actor overall, putting more energy into his performance (which helps his humor), but Costello has lost some of that energy. He doesn't get to shine as much as he does in the previous films, but that's simply because he doesn't get as much limelight time as the other plot threads. You can't go in expecting top shelf comedy, but if it made me laugh, it can't be too bad. It still feels like a longer movie than it is, but there are enough hits for it to justify its own existence.
So that's the Universal horror series! Do I have any lasting regrets? Honestly, not really. If you don't like something, it's best to make sure you experience it first, and I'm glad I broadened my horizons. For the most part, I can understand why these movies are beloved. Some of them are decently successful at what they do, whether it's making us scared, thrilled, or amused. And their monsters are enduring, and not just for visual reasons. Dracula, Imhotep, and Kharis represent the prospect of an ancient, dead evil coming back to menace a world that has forgotten it; Frankenstein's Monster reflects the horrors of man, as he is a victim of cruelty who learns to be cruel and to victimize people; the Wolf Man is the fragility of life, the horror of what it would be like to be cursed; and the Invisible Man shows us where blind arrogance and hunger for power will lead us. Surround that with the usually-impressive imagery and you've got something to fuel the imagination with.
And before you ask, I did consider taking on some of the other monsters associated with Universal. There was also Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but none of the famous Jekyll and Hyde adaptations of the 20th Century--the 1920 version with John Barrymore, the 1931 version with Fredric March, and the 1941 version with Spencer Tracy--were Universal productions, contrary to popular belief (and my own!). I also mulled over examining The Creature from the Black Lagoon and its sequels, but those movies aren't set in the same universe as the others. All the same, I do have one more thing to offer. It's time for a bonus review!
Bonus:
House of the Wolf Man (2009):
House of the Wolf Man was made to star Ron Chaney, Lon Chaney Jr.'s grandson, in an unofficial continuation of the Universal Horror series. In 2009, when I was more closely affiliated with the sort of horror community that fetishized the Universal films, this was a pretty big deal. It toured for one night only at Monster Bash, the annual movie monster festival that I never attended but kept hearing about. However, shortly after its release on DVD, it became sort of a rare item, as it went out of print and used copies became pretty expensive, even now being outside my comfortable price range. It's taken me eight years now to find a bootleg that won't put a virus on my computer (hardly abetted by the fact that I forgot about it till I started working on this retrospective). I'm sure that there are plenty of Universal fan films meant to continue the series, possibly including some featuring relatives of original cast members, but this one always stood out to me as the worthiest contestant for the title of "truly" continuing what Universal laid down. Is it worth it? We'll just have to see!
On a dark and stormy night, several people come to Reinhardt Castle under a notice that they are to inherit the Castle. The present owner is Dr. Bela Reinhardt, and his guests are siblings Reed and Mary Chapel; foxy Elmira Cray; obnoxious nerd Conrad Sullivan; and machismo-sick racist Archibald Whitlock and his squad of African manservants. (Sigh...) It isn't long before the guests realize they are being spied on--also, it can't bode well that the good doctor owns a book by Abdul Alhazred. (Universal Lovecraft, huh? Wonder how they would have handled that...) Dr. Reinhardt then reveals over dinner that his heir will be chosen by process of elimination; thereafter, Whitlock and his servants discover mysterious wolf tracks outside. Hm...
Things grow more complicated when Elmira meets a witch who lives in the Castle, Dr. Reinhardt's mother and her grandmother. Her brother was Bela the werewolf from The Wolf Man (she owns the wolf's-head cane from that film), and with the aid of a wealthy German Baroness she came to America, where she married the Baroness' cousin Peter--not Peter Reinhardt, but Peter Frankenstein. (Peter was last seen as a child in Son of Frankenstein.) But Reinhardt is not merely a Frankenstein--he is a werewolf, and the reason why all the guests' mothers are dead is because he killed them, and he was able to kill them because they were his wives. Yep--all the guests are half-siblings, and Frankenstein has brought them here because he wants to see if his offspring will be werewolves through genetics. If they are not, it apparently means that werewolves are the product of magic, not science. As he chases his spawn through the castle, killing them one by one, Elmira uses a key she received early to free the Frankenstein's Monster (with the help of a rhyming lunatic). The Monster holds the Wolf Man at bay, in a real physical brawl, but Conrad, one of the two survivors with Elmira, is dying. It seems there's one way he can survive, and perhaps it has to do with the mysterious fellow in the cape with the sharp teeth in the doorway...
One thing that I will give House of the Wolf Man is that it is unrelenting in trying to copy the Universal films as closely as possible. On one hand, it gives the movie the refined touch that ought to come with a fan production of this caliber. On the other, it means the movie not only replicates the groaning boredom that comes with a Universal production, but the racism as well. They try to veer off from the racist portrayal of the African characters by having Whitlock seem genuinely sad when they die, but it's still pretty painful to watch. If you really wanted to humanize them, you would have had at least one black guy who speaks non-fragmented English in the main cast. But I suppose anyone who proposed that was shouted down with cries of that breaking the mold they tried to copy.
Complicating things further is the fact that while the movie is overall a well-scripted effort, with lots of good character moments alongside the twists and turns, the acting is...well. Let's just say that if you ever had to do a video project in high school, picture that. They were lucky to get some real theatre kids in on this one, but even Ron Chaney, the ostensible star of the piece, is pretty bad, resembling something somewhat akin to Goldman from House of the Dead 2 (which admittedly works for the role). And the ladies were clearly hired more for their physical attributes than their acting talents, because this is a low-budget horror movie made by men (why, even the predictability is predictable!). Yet I get the impression that everyone on the cast tried their best, and I found it charming in its own way, with the characters having enough individual personality that even stilted acting could sustain them. I should say that the guy who plays Dracula, the late Michael R. Thomas, does a great Bela Lugosi impression--his voice is pretty spot on. The worst I could say about the acting is that I have seen worse. What is odd to me about the script is that it's set about two generations after the events of The Wolf Man, if not later, so it's probably taking place sometime around the early '80s at least. So why are people dressing and speaking as if it were the early '40s? Maybe they're doing it ironically and all desperately trying to out-hipster each other. Who knows.
And yes, I will say it: the monster fights are very, very cool. (Apparently people didn't like the out-of-nowhereness of Dracula, but the rhyming madman in the cellar is the key, I think. You see I think this person is supposed to be Peter Frankenstein, the guests' grandfather--a brief, anomalous piece of rhyming voiceover says that wherever Elmira's great-great-grandfather's creation appears, Dracula will "await invitation" to combat the Monster. Elmira freed the Monster, and thus, Dracula has come to destroy it.) It's a hard movie to accept 100% and there were some choices made that should not have been made in 2009. But I liked it well enough. I mean, hey! It's in an actual House owned by an actual Wolf Man!
On a dark and stormy night, several people come to Reinhardt Castle under a notice that they are to inherit the Castle. The present owner is Dr. Bela Reinhardt, and his guests are siblings Reed and Mary Chapel; foxy Elmira Cray; obnoxious nerd Conrad Sullivan; and machismo-sick racist Archibald Whitlock and his squad of African manservants. (Sigh...) It isn't long before the guests realize they are being spied on--also, it can't bode well that the good doctor owns a book by Abdul Alhazred. (Universal Lovecraft, huh? Wonder how they would have handled that...) Dr. Reinhardt then reveals over dinner that his heir will be chosen by process of elimination; thereafter, Whitlock and his servants discover mysterious wolf tracks outside. Hm...
Things grow more complicated when Elmira meets a witch who lives in the Castle, Dr. Reinhardt's mother and her grandmother. Her brother was Bela the werewolf from The Wolf Man (she owns the wolf's-head cane from that film), and with the aid of a wealthy German Baroness she came to America, where she married the Baroness' cousin Peter--not Peter Reinhardt, but Peter Frankenstein. (Peter was last seen as a child in Son of Frankenstein.) But Reinhardt is not merely a Frankenstein--he is a werewolf, and the reason why all the guests' mothers are dead is because he killed them, and he was able to kill them because they were his wives. Yep--all the guests are half-siblings, and Frankenstein has brought them here because he wants to see if his offspring will be werewolves through genetics. If they are not, it apparently means that werewolves are the product of magic, not science. As he chases his spawn through the castle, killing them one by one, Elmira uses a key she received early to free the Frankenstein's Monster (with the help of a rhyming lunatic). The Monster holds the Wolf Man at bay, in a real physical brawl, but Conrad, one of the two survivors with Elmira, is dying. It seems there's one way he can survive, and perhaps it has to do with the mysterious fellow in the cape with the sharp teeth in the doorway...
One thing that I will give House of the Wolf Man is that it is unrelenting in trying to copy the Universal films as closely as possible. On one hand, it gives the movie the refined touch that ought to come with a fan production of this caliber. On the other, it means the movie not only replicates the groaning boredom that comes with a Universal production, but the racism as well. They try to veer off from the racist portrayal of the African characters by having Whitlock seem genuinely sad when they die, but it's still pretty painful to watch. If you really wanted to humanize them, you would have had at least one black guy who speaks non-fragmented English in the main cast. But I suppose anyone who proposed that was shouted down with cries of that breaking the mold they tried to copy.
Complicating things further is the fact that while the movie is overall a well-scripted effort, with lots of good character moments alongside the twists and turns, the acting is...well. Let's just say that if you ever had to do a video project in high school, picture that. They were lucky to get some real theatre kids in on this one, but even Ron Chaney, the ostensible star of the piece, is pretty bad, resembling something somewhat akin to Goldman from House of the Dead 2 (which admittedly works for the role). And the ladies were clearly hired more for their physical attributes than their acting talents, because this is a low-budget horror movie made by men (why, even the predictability is predictable!). Yet I get the impression that everyone on the cast tried their best, and I found it charming in its own way, with the characters having enough individual personality that even stilted acting could sustain them. I should say that the guy who plays Dracula, the late Michael R. Thomas, does a great Bela Lugosi impression--his voice is pretty spot on. The worst I could say about the acting is that I have seen worse. What is odd to me about the script is that it's set about two generations after the events of The Wolf Man, if not later, so it's probably taking place sometime around the early '80s at least. So why are people dressing and speaking as if it were the early '40s? Maybe they're doing it ironically and all desperately trying to out-hipster each other. Who knows.
And yes, I will say it: the monster fights are very, very cool. (Apparently people didn't like the out-of-nowhereness of Dracula, but the rhyming madman in the cellar is the key, I think. You see I think this person is supposed to be Peter Frankenstein, the guests' grandfather--a brief, anomalous piece of rhyming voiceover says that wherever Elmira's great-great-grandfather's creation appears, Dracula will "await invitation" to combat the Monster. Elmira freed the Monster, and thus, Dracula has come to destroy it.) It's a hard movie to accept 100% and there were some choices made that should not have been made in 2009. But I liked it well enough. I mean, hey! It's in an actual House owned by an actual Wolf Man!
Notably, there is also a licensed Universal Horror novel written by Jeff Rovins called Return of the Wolf Man, which serves as a sequel not only to Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, but also White Zombie, The Monolith Monsters, The Deadly Mantis, and others. I'm sure I'll read it someday, if anything because I've heard it's not very good.
And while I normally don't rank the movies I watch, I decided to do so this time around. Behold, the final statistics:
Awesome/Trashtastic: Dracula's Daughter, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Mummy
Good (But Not Awesome): Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Invisible Man Returns, Invisible Agent, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, House of the Wolf Man
Not Horrible: Son of Dracula, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, The Mummy's Ghost
What is This Rubbish: Dracula, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The Invisible Woman, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, The Mummy's Curse
Six of 24 are great, and only four of those are included because I consider them to be great horror movies (Bride of Frankenstein and House of Frankenstein I only appreciate as bad movies). To be honest, that's better than I was expecting. It's only too bad that seven of them are some of the worst films I've ever laid eyes on, with special shoutouts to The Invisible Woman and The Mummy's Tomb. May I never see anything like them ever again.
Thanks for reading! Next time I'll be back again with something a bit more germane to my usual interests.
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Image Sources: Wikipedia, Classic Movie Posters, Universal Horror Wiki, Monster Bash
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