THE MUMMY'S HAND
© Universal Pictures
The Mummy's Wrap-sody Part One
By: John ThonenDate: Saturday, June 01, 2002
The mummy [IMG2R]has made film appearances in every decade since its 1933 birth. In spite of this longevity, the original wrapper has only recently claimed a berth amongst monster movie royalty thanks to Stephen Sommers' hugely popular THE MUMMY and THE MUMMY RETURNS, both of which have been recently re-released in a collector's two-pack from Universal. With the release of each of Sommers' films, the genre press has trotted out a look at past mummy films from Universal and Hammer, most of which are already well familiar to any serious horror movie buff. However, the mummy has also appeared in a number of odd and obscure films over the past seventy years which were not part of the well-known offerings of the two studios most connected with cinematic mummy lore.
Unlike the other "classic" monsters of the '30s, the mummy didn't derive from either classic literature nor familiar folklore. It was a monster created for the movies alone and, when Karloff's 1933 film failed to catch on with the audience, the character was rapidly relegated to increasingly lesser showcases. Just how quickly this happened can be seen in MUMMY'S BOYS, a "comedy" from the justly forgotten film team of Wheeler and Woolsey, which was offering the mummy as an inept menace a mere three years after Karloff's introduction of the character. The mummy would also serve as the target of derisive laughs in 1939's WE WANT OUR MUMMY, a 3 Stooges short involving the mummy of King Rootentooten.
The '40s [IMG3L]and '50s saw the mummy on screen most frequently in the rapidly declining Universal series, but 1957 offered the forgotten PHARAOH'S CURSE, reportedly a failed TV pilot padded to feature length. The '60s found Hammer Studios trying to mine the mummy to create another horror series for them, but there was also the very obscure I WAS A TEENAGE MUMMY in 1962 and Ray Dennis Steckler's THE LEMON GROVE KIDS MEET THE MUMMY, which was a no-budget homage to the Bowery Boys which Steckler director of the infamous INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED UP ZOMBIES created from two shorts about his overage delinquents meeting Frankenstein's Monster, Dracula, the Wolfman and the mummy.
Meanwhile, in 1969, Spanish horror star Jacinto Molina (best known as Paul Naschy) starred in LOS MONSTRUOS DEL TERROR (ASSIGNMENT EARTH in the U.S.) which offered the full array of classic monsters under the control of an alien, a badly slumming Michael Rennie from THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. Molina was back in 1973 for LA VENGANZA DE LA MORNIA. This time around, the stocky former weightlifter played the mummy himself, looking even sillier than bulky Lon Chaney did in essaying the supposedly skeletal character. Molina would be one of the few filmmakers outside the U.S. to utilize the mummy character, though Brazil's greatest (and probably only) horror star, Jose Mojica Marins (best known as Coffin Joe) did make O SECREDO DA MUMIA in 1982.
Bram (DRACULA) Stoker's [IMG4R]1903 novel THE JEWEL OF THE SEVEN STARS has provided source material for at least three mummy films, this in spite of the novel having featured no ambulatory mummy at all. Hammer took a shot with BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB in 1972 while Charlton Heston took the lead in 1980's THE AWAKENING. That film stayed fairly true to Stoker's tale (there is no walking mummy in the film) but featured an advertising campaign deceitfully based around the image of the mummy. The latest adaptation of Stoker's tale of a woman possessed by the spirit of an ancient Egyptian princess was 1997's LEGEND OF THE MUMMY, which tried, rather awkwardly, to insert a killer mummy into an otherwise fairly faithful telling of Stoker's story.
In the 1980s, the Italian film industry was riding high on the crest of an international mania for horror and gore and, having made just about every variation imaginable of George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD zombies, took a shot at flesh-eating mummies with 1981's DAWN OF THE MUMMY. The following year, Roger Corman produced TIME WALKER, a dreadfully dull sci-fi tale with the novel idea of a space alien who was mummified in the tomb of King Tut and revived by an accidental dose of X-rays which render his touch deadly. By the time the film's long due denouement arrives, the space visitor is unwrapped and shown to apparently be a cast-off member of the Beach Boys, and that he never meant to hurt anyone. All of which, I'm sure, made those people he killed feel pretty guilty for their insensitivity to his plight.
While actually [IMG5L]produced in 1969, the thoroughly obscure THE MUMMY AND THE CURSE OF THE JACKAL went unreleased until a sparse 1985 video deal. This one involves revived ancient princesses, were-jackals and monsters on the streets of Las Vegas. It all makes little sense and becomes even more embarrassing in light of a connection to the well-known Universal Mummy series thanks to an appearance by John Carradine from THE MUMMY'S GHOST and the fact that director Oliver Drake had been a producer on 1945's THE MUMMY'S CURSE.
Prolific B-movie mogul Fred Olen Ray unveiled one of the then-developing video market's first direct-to-video hits with 1985's THE TOMB, a film he made because he had access to a an elaborate Egyptian styled set created for an Indiana Jones inspired jeans commercial. The mummy was only briefly seen in this tale, having quickly assumed the "very" human form of scream queen Michelle Bauer, proving once again Ray's axiom of exploitation filmmaking "The cheapest special visual effect in the world is a woman's breasts."
Be sure to check back soon for part two of our mummy retrospective.
