Blood From the Mummy's Tomb
by Seth Holt
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Andrew Keir, Billiers, George Coulouis, James, Valerie LeonDirector: Seth Holt
Producer: Howard Brandy
Writer: Christopher Wicking
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: NTSC
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 1 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2012-01-06
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: LIONSGATE
Movie Reviews of Blood From the Mummy's Tomb
Movie Review: Who - - Or What - - Must Not Be Named
Summary: 5 Stars
The bosomy young woman Margaret wakes up screaming from a nightmare. Her father Julian comes into her bedroom to comfort her. A scar across Margaret's right wrist makes it look like she has tried to slash it in the past. What could have driven this young woman, who lives alone with her father, to try to kill herself?
Julian gives Margaret a ring with seven stars in the shape of the Big Dipper reflected in it and makes her wear it "for protection." (This movie is based on Bram Stoker's novel Jewel of the Seven Stars and is better than the book.) Margaret and her father hold each other for just a little too long, and Julian looks just a little too longingly into Margaret's eyes.
Wearing the ring, Margaret belongs to her father in a way she hasn't until now. But this relationship must be doomed.
I've read that victims of incest sometimes feel like it's happening to someone else. Margaret really is someone else - - Tera, the uncorrupted beauty Julian stole from Egypt and now keeps hidden in his basement, the woman he sneaks away to look at every night, the woman he wishes his daughter was. (Of course Tera and Margaret are identical).
Decades ago Julian and a group of archeologists found Tera in her crypt, where she had been placed by ancient Egyptian priests who chopped off her right hand (to represent the unnamed "sin" she had committed) and left her to rot. But first they obliterated all reference to Tera, and left a message over her tomb that within lay "She Who Must Not Be Named."
But Tera is "above law and taboo" and it is the priests who die, while Tera waits in her tomb for Margaret to begin to dream of her once Margaret "comes of age." In other words, once Margaret is old enough for her father.
The scientists found Tera's preserved body with its perpetually bleeding right arm (Hammer films did this kind of thing very well) at the exact moment Margaret was being born in England. Both Margaret and her mother died, but once Tera was uncovered by Julian, the baby Margaret started breathing again.
Why did Julian leave his wife in England when she was about to give birth? Egyptian sarcophagi had waited thousands of years; they'd wait another few weeks. Why did he abandon his wife to search for the beautiful Tera, or whatever Tera represented to him? Was Julian tired of his wife already? Did he already want something more? Something strange? Something forbidden?
As Tera's personality gradually replaces Margaret's, she dreams of a "land far away" with "no scheming priesthood, no repressive or archaic laws, and love is the divine possession of the soul." A place where any love is permissible.
Now we may guess what at least one of Tera's sins was. At the moment Margaret's mother died, Margaret became her relplacement.
As Julian looks down at Tera's body, wanting her, you see his knowledge of the wrongness of it in his face. I think Andrew Keir (star of Quatermass and the Pit) - - fleshy, with a sensuous Scottish accent - - was better suited to this role than the thin and flinty Englishman Peter Cushing, who started work on Blood from the Mummy's Tomb but left after his wife died. (If Cushing had played the role, I wonder if I would have even thought about the idea of incest. Which leads to more questions - - did the filmmakers intend it or did that "taboo" come from the actors' performances?)
Margaret has a boyfriend who hits her at one point. Most of the men in her life now that she's a grown, sexually available woman brutalize her in one way or another. Her father is using her, as is one of Julian's old colleagues who wants to control Tera's evil power. (Margaret's boyfriend is named Tod Browning, for the director of Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Freaks. Sometimes in-jokes just take you out of the story and are unnecessary. In a film that doesn't pretend to be anything but a comedy, like Shaun of the Dead, it doesn't matter, but in a movie that takes its story seriously it's better to resist the urge. But to be fair, when this movie came out in 1972 fewer people may have even gotten the reference.)
Julian and Margaret are shown to be matched as a couple in another way. Tera has had her right hand cut off. Julian has a stroke that paralyzes the right side of his body, leaving him unable to use (especially to raise, if I'm not getting too Freudian) his right arm.
In the conflagration at the end, Margaret and her father almost kiss. They slowly come together and almost do it. But they resist and hold hands. In the end they have to accept that they're "as meaningless as all of the dead." (One thing I like about Hammer horror movies over some Universal pictures is that Hammer makes them tragedies. There's no redemption at the end.)
The last scene is chilling and finally makes Blood from the Mummy's Tomb a "mummy movie."
Summary of Blood From the Mummy's Tomb
Margaret (Valerie Leon) suffers a recurring nightmare in which she sees an ancient Egyptian queen, to whom she bears an uncannyt resemblance, sealed up in a sarcophagus. The priests who entomb her first chop off her hand, before throwing it to jackals. They are then killed by a mysterious and powerful force that lacerates their throats. Margaret's father, Professor Fuchs (Andrew Keir), gives her a ring that he discovered in the tomb of Queen Tera 20 years before- the ring was on the queen's disembodied hand. At the moment Fuchs discovered the Queen's perfectly preserved, still bleeding body, MArgaret's mother died giving birth to her. It transpire that Margaret is a vessel for Tera's magic. When a certain celestial condjuction is complete, and three key artefacts are assembled by Tera's corpse, the evil sorceress will be reborn... The shooting of this complex and disturbing film was beset by tragedy. Original star Peter Cushing had to leave the production after just one day when his wife fell ill and subsequently died. Five weeks into shooting director Seth Holt suffered a heart attack and died, leaving Hammer's managing director Michael Carreras to complete the remaining sequences.This product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
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