The Halloween Diary: Mummy Madness!

I am retiring my Mummy Legacy set for the year with the trifecta of secondary "Lon Chaney" Kharis Mummy movies through Universal, allowing minor directors use of the back lot to offer to monster fans cheap-budget B-movies during the 40s as the era of the Gothic horror was waning towards its end. Chaney once again is handed a character and does pretty much nothing with it. He shambles around in marvelous Jack Pierce makeup, with the bandages either dug in tight to the torso or hanging off ready for someone to take a nice tug to see the zombie unravel. I have never liked the idea of saddling the character with a bum arm because you are subject to scenes where Kharis uses it to carry a woman. Even worse, we are expected to believe that healthy men can't escape his slumbering pace and ability to corner them and strangle them with the good arm. It happens primarily in The Mummy's Ghost (a title which doesn't make a damn bit of sense), but he favors the arm also in The Mummy's Tomb.

The formula is what it is: the mummy Kharis is taken to New England (Mableton) town where the archaeologist from The Mummy's Hand (Dick Foran's Steven Banning) is living as an elder gent, as his doctor son plans to wed a pretty young woman soon. How could he imagine that Kharis, a mummy he set on fire back in Egypt, would show up in his room to strangle him? One thing you learn in this series of Mummy movies...you can't keep a bad zombie down.

You have three different devoted (to a point) servants sent from the High Priest of Arkam (except in The Mummy’s Hand and Tomb when it was the High Priest of Karnak) in Egypt (or Africa; take your pick) to get revenge on the archeologists who desecrated the tomb of Ananka and her lover, Kharis. Dick Foran and Wallace Ford returned from The Mummy’s Hand in Pierce’s wonderful old age makeup (aging them 30 years which is when The Mummy’s Tomb takes place in New England) to all victim to Kharis (not as menacing in the form of Chaney as it was with lesser billed Tom Tyler, even though the costume and effort behind the authenticity of the bandages is so eerie when he creeps about in the dark).

Dragging that leg, with the arm clasped to his chest unless those behind the screenplays just forgot, if Kharis was allowed to be free from such frailties, it would have only added to the makeup and sinister night scenes in the Bayou swamp sets or New England rural areas. That and it would have made those who wrote the scripts for the latter films look less foolish or lazy.

Even with the shitty scripts and plot developments (in The Mummy’s Ghost, John Carradine’s Yousef Bey just up and decides he will take the striking tall and hour-glass figured Ramsay Ames for his lover, soon enraging Kharis into coming after him; Turhan Bey’s Mehemet Bey catches the sight of Elyse Knox and John Hubbard (Hubbard is Banning’s son, Knox is Isobel his fiancé) and immediately lusts and desires for her, unable to get her out of his mind, ruining his mission; even in The Mummy’s Hand, George Zucco’s servant to the High Priest of Karnak got carried away in his urges for a young woman), the direction can sometimes help ease us through them.

The one-handed strangulations, though (he gets a bunch of folks in The Mummy’s Curse), stretch credibility to the max and just don’t live up to scrutiny. How victims just seem to become powerless as if his grip was kryptonite leaves much to be desired. Now if he had access to both hands, those strangulations would be damned effective. Imagine Chaney, under the wraps coming after folks with both those hands reaching out to snap the necks of victims. If the idea was to provide vulnerability to Kharis then how can he just render victims helpless with a single clasp of one hand to the throat?

The Mummy’s Curse is the case of Jekyll & Hyde in its construction. It has this stunning resurrection scene where Virginia Christine (replacing Ames as Ananka) reaches out a hand from underneath the earth of a drained part of the swamp. She emerges head to toe in dried mud-dirt looking for a while like a petrified corpse. Of course she approaches water, appearing seconds later with perfect hair and makeup, looking fantastic, with even her gown not as worse for wear. Christine has an enigmatic character but the film just doesn’t let her do a hell of a lot which is a shame. Hard to squeeze a lot in during 65 minutes. Curse has too many villains (Chaney’s mummy, basically a patsy to be ordered around until it can’t take it anymore; Bey as the high priest; Kosleck’s slimey, knife-in-the-back-stabbing servant to Bey, eventually betraying him for (yes, yet again) for the lust of a secretary), and not one single interesting hero (Dennis Moore as a visiting scientist from the Scripps Museum isn’t in the film long enough, and his character is just too underwritten to mean anything). And the inexplicable transplant of the setting where the mummy and princess went into the swamp (New England to the Bayou, from the North of the country to the South) without explanation is mind-bogglingly inept. But the atmospheric direction and change of locale (if it just made sense, I wouldn’t be so frustrated as a viewer trying to make sense of the nonsensical) help exponentially in at least giving Curse an aesthetic advantage over the rather ho-hum environment of the campus or farms of Mableton where Universal sadly takes out of the exotic into the modern. I always admired Universal for creating cultures and people completely alien to the societies we are accustomed to. I like the fairy tale myself.

The Mummy’s Tomb has Bey confronting “American infidels” when the mummy carries of the woman he was actually wanting, pulling a gun on John Banning getting himself killed, Yousef in The Mummy’s Ghost has the reincarnation of Ananka (now this is a development of the most surreal; Kharis and Yousef find the mummified Ananka in her tomb in the Scripps Museum in Mableton, but when Kharis reaches for his long-lost love, her bodies vanishes, and Ames’ body “inherits” her spirit!) and Kharis ready for transport back to Egypt and squanders it all out of fleeting lust, and Zucco’s High Priest confronts Babe unwisely, basically encouraging the clown to shoot him. Even more perplexing, those behind the script decide to let Kosleck (with not a single menacing bone in his body; he looks like the weakling the bully stuffs in the locker room at school) surface as the chief villain while Peter Coe’s Ilzar Zandaab just turns his back to him after telling him he’d suffer horribly for bringing a lady up to their hiding place deep in the wilderness of the Bayou (an old monastery; this turns out to be a cool set for the finale, featuring a weak fight that ends well with a crumbling portion of the building capsizing as the structure isn’t sound in areas). I can keep on but I think you get the gist. There seemed to be a mentality of produce something quickly, get it in the can, and out to theaters. Attention to detail isn’t as important as putting the product into the market as soon as possible.

Whether Kharis was seemingly burned alive in The Mummy's Tomb (and The Mummy's Hand), drowned in a swamp (in New England) in The Mummy's Ghost, or buried under the rubble of a collapsing monastery, there's never a sure certainty the damned mummy won't show itself gradually revealing itself from the dark, with that one hand reaching to crush your larynx. And just because he might walk into the waters of New England doesn't mean he would eventually surface in Louisiana. It seems he can teleport if he so chooses.