>Convincing sets: The young prince’s slaves, though lost and
starving in the dessert, actually had a stroke of luck. They seemed to wander
into a naturally-occurring tomb! While the prince’s sand-mummy is actually very
well done, the cave in which he is buried is much too perfect and squared-away.
So I either have to believe that natural caverns are square, or that half-dead
slaves took a little time out of their whole starving to death preoccupation
(slaves are so self-involved!) to hack out huge blocks of limestone with the
chisels and rock hammers they apparently had hidden in their slave-rags. (Oh,
and they also apparently embalmed the prince’s head servant so that he could
watch over the prince. Priorities, people! Or maybe that was later. But it
couldn’t have been later, he would have starved to death with the others! Ow! My
brains!)
To be fair, in the present day most of the fake antiquities used for
set dressing look better than the usual Hammer crap.
Of course, a film isn’t measured by production values alone. A great
cast can save almost any turkey. However this film’s level of characterization
can best be evidenced by the fact that I’m straining to remember if it had
characters at all. I seem to remember a dedicated young Egyptologist, but I
think he may have been in another movie like this. (Or more to the point,
every other fricken movie like this! ) His
mother, (My notes identify her as Mrs. Preston. Thanks, past me! Oh how you must
have suffered!) doesn’t seem at all concerned about her family’s imminent
destruction. (Fact is, she seems blithely tickled by it!) To a point, this is
understandable as she’s married to an arrogant old fart who drags the
proceedings down with his flatulent simpering. Maggie Kimberly plays Clair…
Something. She’s the movie’s default protagonist, as she’s the only one who ever
does anything. She’s, um, she’s not a very good actress. And as for her sex
appeal, without pulling a John Simon, let me just say that in 1960’s England,
she could still only be considered moderately attractive. Nuff said?
As you
might have inferred by now, I found this thing tiring as hell. If you’ve seen
one mummy movie like this, you’ve seen them all. Much like an assembly line
zombie film, when the plot doesn’t bring anything new to the table (and indeed,
drags on endlessly) it’s up to the protagonists to whip up some drama, usually
in the form of character conflict. Here the players seem to be either paint by
numbers non-entities, or irritating prats. This film lasts for 90 minutes and
there’s not one damn thing to look at!
Barring production values, acting and direction, the only thing that
could save a film like this is an intelligent, original story. Pardon me while I
laugh. As you may have gathered from my plot intro, the only original thing
about this particular mummy movie (aside from the titular McGuffin) is, um, …
sorry, there’s nothing else. Present is the standard issue mad Arab sorcerer,
whose surname of course is “Bey”. (I don’t know how anyone convinced the various
descendants of the Bey clan to waste thousands of generations guarding the
dreary tombs of forgotten royalty. It certainly wasn’t the dental plan!) He is
stopped by our “beautiful” young heroine, the only one who can stir pity in the
mummy. The plot is as threadbare and meandering as the undead himself. The
dialog is meaningless, and as mentioned before the characters are all pretty
unlikable. For those snotty purists amongst you who hated Stephen Sommers recent
’Mummy’ series, I look you straight in the eye and say; at least it wasn’t boring
garbage like this, and it managed to have a little fun with these moldy sub
genre conventions.
There is precisely one good thing about this film, the ending. No,
I’m not being snarky, the final dissolution of the mummy is completely awesome;
he crumbles away to dust, tearing away at his own decaying face. And after
watching this film, I knew just how he felt.
Explain to me again why Hammer was a good studio?
Explain to me again why Hammer was a good studio?