Main Feature Synopsis –The Mummy (1932)
The Mummy, directed by Karl Freund, begins with the discovery of a tomb in Egypt in 1922 where the high priest Im-Ho-Tep is accidentally awakened and escapes into the wilderness. Ten years later, Im-Ho-Tep has cleaned up and taken on a new identity as Ardeth Bey. Pretending to help an expedition looking to uncover another tomb, he is actually working to reanimate the body of the woman he died for 3000 years ago.

Shawn’s Impressions
People today continue to bitch about how poorly horror films are handled. They talk on end about how cheap they are, how trashy they are, and how many direct-to-video sequels are made. Well, there was a time before video; there are tons of films that were never released on video at all. So, while there were no shitty direct-to-video releases, there were plenty of quick, haphazard direct-to-theatre films being dropped.

Karl Freund’s The Mummy was released the year after James Whale’s Frankenstein. In-between these two films, the main star Boris Karloff appeared in nine other films. Some of these, like Scarface, The Old Dark House and The Mask Of Fu Manchu, were classics in their own right. But the point I am trying to make is that, more often than not, for all the classics out there, there were just as many rushed films being made that repeated the same formulas. Sometimes, studios even copied themselves.

Take The Mummy, for instance. If you strike out the names of the characters, change the setting, and call Karloff’s character “Monster X”, what do you think the end result of the film would be? I’ll tell you. It would be Tod Browning’s Dracula. I’m not saying that the film is an exact copy of the other, but they certainly feel that way. Both characters are undead. Both characters hypnotize their victims. Both of them appear as distinguished gentlemen. And so on, and so forth.

The Mummy may not be all that original, but that doesn’t make it a bad film in any way. In fact, it’s a really fun monster movie. Karloff, as a monster, gets to be articulate, which is something that he didn’t get to do in the original Frankenstein. He plays the menacing Im-Ho-Tep, even though by appearance he seems incredibly frail. Nevertheless, he’s a take-charge kind of guy, and actually becomes quite sympathetic (unlike Lugosi’s parasitic Dracula) as we learn the hell that he went through because of his forbidden love. Every guy that has ever gone through shit over a girl can look at Im-Ho-Tep with sympathy, just as women can marvel at his romantic demeanor, and both sexes will still be frightened by his methods.

If I have any real complaints with The Mummy, the most major of them would have to be that we don’t see much “Mummy” action. Very few scenes have Karloff wrapped up. But viewers need not worry. With the other four “sequels”, we see plenty of that (from a different actor), and it’s less exciting than you might suspect.

Cary’s Impressions
The Mummy is Universal’s monster with the broken heart. Seriously, the question I always had was, are these horror films or romances? When it gets right down to it, the Mummy is just a punk-ass bitch. Easily my least favorite of the Universal Horror franchises, the various “mummies” (be they Im-Ho-Tep from the original or Kharis from the sequels) and their evil priest masters are all just suckers for love. They are the most politically correct of the monsters, each one existing simply to restore their female object of desire to the pedestal off which she fell in death. They exist solely to worship their one true love. Where Dracula was a Transylvanian, death-dealing pimp, The Mummy is his turtleneck wearing, folk-guitar strumming counterpart.

As long as you understand that up front, then I think you can appreciate the films for what they are, namely twisted gothic romances. In the original movie, The Mummy, an archaeologist unwittingly wakes the high priest Im-Ho-Tep by reading an ancient scroll. Ten years later, Im-Ho-Tep is now known as Ardeth Bey and is determined to reanimate the body of the woman he died for so many years ago.

Soon, he finds that the spirit of the woman he loved has been reincarnated into the body of Helen Grosvenor, played by Zita Johann. He sets out to awaken her to her true nature so that he can perform the rituals that will keep them alive together for eternity.

There’s your plot, more or less, for every single sequel aside from The Mummy’s Hand. Still, this movie has three things that all the others don’t: First up, it’s got Karloff. In 1932, he was still riding high from his performance as the Frankenstein monster in James Whale’s classic. Universal handpicked this movie for him, and rightfully so. Karloff may have been the only actor at that time who could have made you feel compassion for a character looking to kill and mummify his beloved.

Next, you’ve got Karl Freund in his American debut as a director. Freund’s cinematography work on Dracula showed lots of promise, though Browning kept him on a short leash. In this film he gets to show off, and The Mummy is full of wonderful tracking shots, fantastic framing and truly artistic settings. His shot setup for the reanimation scene is nothing short of brilliant.

Finally, you’ve got a fantastic supporting cast, not the least of which includes Edward Van Sloan (who had appeared in both Tod Browning’s Dracula and James Whale’s Frankenstein) as Dr. Muller. Also holding his own is David Manners (again from Dracula) as Frank Whemple, the man in love with Helen and determined to stop Im-Ho-Tep from his nefarious plan. Probably the biggest score of them all, aside from Karloff, was casting Zita Johann as Helen Grosvenor. She’s exotic, erotic, and according to at least one of the historians on the documentary, nuttier than a fruitcake. The fact that she believed in many of the occult practices being talked about in the film only makes her performance that much better. It’s like casting Courtney Love as a junkie.

With all that, you can’t help but have a winner, but The Mummy really does not work as a horror movie to me. We only see Im-Ho-Tep in his Mummy-guise at the beginning of the film, and from that point forward, we see Karloff in modern Egyptian dress. Sure he acts creepy, but really he’s more of an evil man of mystery who is hopelessly in love. The Mummy works better as a strangely twisted romance, and back in 1932 that probably constituted horror. Today, it comes across as somewhat endearing. Maybe that’s just the Bauhaus fan in me. 

The Mummy’s Hand (1940)

Synopsis
Two archaeologists find a map to the lost tomb of Egyptian princess Ananka. They enlist the help of a stage magician and his daughter to finance an expedition. Little do they know that a cult of priests is determined to keep the tomb unopened by unleashing Ananka’s long-dead lover, the mummy Kharis. 

Shawn: I didn't hate The Mummy’s Hand. I thought it was a fun film, if not scary.

Cary:  This movie really, really pisses me off. I've already stated my dislike of this particular franchise; however, I think you fail to realize how poor a start it gets off to with this film. It really is less of a horror movie and more of an adventure story, only without the adventure and with some really, really lame attempts at comedy. Who would have thought that Universal Studios would try to make their own Abbott and Costello team instead of just fucking hiring Abbott and Costello?

Shawn: I don't find it ironic in the slightest that the 1999 remake was essentially an action film and that the villain has traits of both Kharis and the original Im-Ho-Tep. The Mummy hardly had any “Mummyness” to it, and The Mummy’s Hand had too much.

Cary:  You know, though, say what you will about that remake, but it got things pretty right on. This movie did not.

Shawn: Oh, I'm a big fan of the remake.

Cary:  But this film… Wallace Ford as Babe Jennings is who I will have to sit next to in Hell. You watch. Some other lucky bastard will get Hitler, Idi Amin or Yakov Smirnov, but I'll pull Ford doing his best Jennings bit. His character does nothing useful in the entire film except try to provide comic relief. The whole time he is doing a very, very lame impersonation of Lou Costello.

Shawn: I just don't think that The Mummy’s Hand is that bad of a film. If you remove all of the comic elements, you at least have a standard enjoyable film, but any movie featuring a MAN (as opposed to say, a pig) named BABE is just asking to be made fun of.

Cary:  I didn’t even like the lead, though. Dick Foran plays Abbott part of the time and a half-asleep Indiana Jones the rest of the time. Again, he completely lacks any compelling trait. The whole time this movie is on I am trying really hard to give a damn and I just can't. I hate this film, but almost entirely because of him and Ford. You're right, though, in that the story has promise. There's no reason it couldn't have worked. It establishes the Kharis character well and also the line of priests who keep him alive.

Shawn: You're so cute when you get angry, Cary.

Cary:  I did some digging around on IMDB with these. The story is by Griffin Jay, who is at least partially responsible for the next two sequels also. If you look at his track record, these are really the best things he did, which isn't saying a hell of a lot. Then again, he’s written more movies that made it to the big screen than I have, so there's something.

Shawn: I think he only wrote one script and used it for all three movies.

Cary:  Exactly my point. Every sequel is kind of a retread with this franchise, which brings us to The Mummy’s Tomb.

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