The Mummy
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Movie Reviews of The Mummy
Movie Review: The Mummy
Summary: 4 Stars
Okay... bullets don't stop him, bogs don't drown him, and running a spear through him simply causes a handful of desiccated kidney dust to pour out of the exit site and, if those blazing brown eyes are any indication, get madder than he was to begin with. How do you stop Kharis (Christopher Lee), the Mummy, who has traveled from Egypt to the peaceful countryside of England to wreak havoc (aka, kill) the three English archeologists who desecrated the tomb of his beloved, Princess Ananka. Traveling with is his keeper, Mehemet Bey (George Pastell), who conveniently carries along with him, in a mini-mummy casket, a scroll of life which, when read, brings them back from the dead.
Man, what a thankless role Lee was stuck with in this one. His mummy makeup is as stiff as a plaster cast, he doesn't even get to growl, and the only emotion he's allowed to express in this one - save for an extended flashback scene where's he's the high priest preparing the Princess for burial - is through the eyes. Of course, Kharis had a forbidden, meddlesome love for the Princess, which helped accelerate his outraged congregation turning him into Dust-for-Guts, so I guess he had it coming to him. That forbidden love was a good thing for archeologist John Banning (Peter Cushing) though, who had the great good sense to marry Princess Ananka look-alike Isobel (Yvonne Furneaux.) If guns, bogs, and spears won't stop the Mummy (why didn't anyone think about a bucket of creosote and a lit match!? Sigh.) a squealed "Stop!" from Isobel/Ananka seems fairly effective.
THE MUMMY is one of those fun Hammer House films I haven't watched for a generation or so and delight in rediscovering. Cushing it at the top of his form, and Lee makes the most of his limited opportunities to generate sympathy for the monster. The Mummy is one of the hardest of the classic monsters to warm up to. Dracula is heartless but has a cold charm and more than enough style to hold our attention. Frankenstein's Monster is a pathetic creature in battle with his creator. The Wolfman's got that wolfbane curse that was a result of an accident totally beyond his control. The Mummy defies his gods by attempting to resurrect the Princess, and spends most movies trying to reunite with her. To their credit, Hammer's Mummy also has Mehemet Bey, who preys upon the residual guilt of the English for robbing Egypt of her sacred treasures. So this Mummy has a two-track, lost love/revenge theme going. Good fun, THE MUMMY is about as family-safe film as you'll find. There's no nudity, extremely minimal gore, and there's more talk than scare. Interesting talk, too, especially the third act guilt-trip Mehemet Bey tries to lay on Banning. Solid recommendation.
Movie Review: No extras to speak of but fine picture
Summary: 4 Stars
Really, The Mummy was a bit of a limited character. When Karloff played the role in the 30's under Karl Freud's direction, he spent very little time under wraps. That film, although atmospheric, is as dull as can be. Even as a kid I thought it lacked any sort of spark or excitement. Universal revived The Mummy in the 40's with a sucession of actors "playing" the role. These guys were all wrapped up in themselves. The character was played as a mindless brute and the stories were routine.Terry Fisher's The Mummy was a marked improvement over the Universal films. First and foremost is the way the action sequences were staged. Fisher and Jack Asher do a great job with these sequences despite budget limitations. Asher's photography is stunning. The DVD remains pretty true to the best presentations I've seen of The Mummy. While there are versions with brighter more vivid color, they also suffer from a lack of detail (particularly the VHS and Laserdisc versions).
This time they actually put an actor under the bandages. Christopher Lee does his best to emote under tons of make up and manages to reach the audience with his eyes. They are expressive and display a wide range of emotions for the character. He's still something of a mindless brute but, well, at least he has some emotions now! Cushing is, as always, great in his role. Cushing brings makes the character energetic and his acting is extra crispy (we all know the extra crispy KFC is better than the original receipe, right?).
The support cast is drawn from a stable of Hammer regulars and all are up to the task. It's not quite as stylish or sophisticated as Horror of Dracula (where Jimmy Sangster essentially just adapted some very basic plot elements from Stoker and embelished them), Curse of Frankenstein (with its marvelous portrayal of Dr. Frankenstein as a sociopath) or Revenge of Frankenstein but it has its moments.
I can't comment on the widescreen presentation as I don't currently have the other versions to compare this to. I do believe (from my memory) that the color and detail is sharper in this DVD. I can't comment on the foreign edition as I don't know if the copy that was used to make the DVD was this one.
Yes, it should have all sorts of extras. There's only the trailer. This film is fairly short so Warner could have included the full screen and wide screen versions as well as some sort of audio commentary. That's Warner for you. I keep hoping that Rhino will take an interest in the Hammer films and reissue them like the Warner/Atlantic music releases.
Movie Review: Make supple the limbs...
Summary: 4 Stars
In the world of horror, the mummy sits right next to vampires and werewolves -- creepy supernatural things that can rip you to bits.
And they are rarely scarier than they are in "The Mummy," a classic horror movie with no blood, no gore, not even any curses. Yet this is creepier -- and more frightening -- than any dozen fright flicks from Hollywood now. Of course, having Christopher Lee lurching through locked doors helps.
A pair of archaeologists uncover the tomb of Egyptian Princess Ananka, but once inside, Stephen Banning (Felix Aylmer) collapses into gibbering madness. Three years later, a mysterious box arrives in England, at the same time that Banning tells his son John (Peter Cushing) that something is coming to kill him. He's found strangled in a padded cell.
It turns out that Stephen was murdered by a "living mummy," a disgraced priest who was buried alive in Ananka's tomb to protect his beloved. Now a zealot has brought the mummy to England, and is using it to kill off anyone who dared go into the tomb. Now John must stop them both, using his wife's resemble to Ananka...
"The Mummy" got a big-budget, low-talent remake in the late 90s, which shares a few things with this movie, but the Hammer Horror version is probably the most memorable and well-made. Partly that is due to the hulking, silent, menacing mummy, and partly due to solid scripting and some very good acting.
Okay, the Egyptian sets are hokey, and the Hammer people had little knowledge of ancient Egypt ("Karnak" is a place, not a god). But the film blossoms as it gets back to England, full of misty bogs and dark country mansions. It's an unlikely spot for a 4000-year-old Egyptian to wreak havoc, but it works surprisingly well.
The script injects a poignancy to the mummy's story, since he suffered a fate worse than death for love, and even now gets all mushy over a woman who looks like Ananka. At the same time, he's also a ruthless killer who strangles his victims without batting an eye.
Cushing plays the role, again, of a man who battles the forces of evil, no matter how bizarre or out-there they may be. And he does a solid job. Lee is outstanding, especially considering that his head is covered in papier-mache. The change of expression whenever he sees Isobel, a dead ringer for Ananka, is magnificently poignant.
"The Mummy" remains one of Hammer Horror's best films, with its solid acting and taut direction. Still creepy after all these years.
Movie Review: Entertaining Mummy from Hammer Studios
Summary: 4 Stars
I've been on a mummy kick lately, having checked out the Universal Studios Legacy Collection with the 1933 original and four 1940's era sequels, and now this (and I suppose Brendan Frasier is next). Karloff's original remains the best by far, but this would be next one on the quality index.
Admittedly, I'm a big fan of the Hammer Studios productions, and especially those with both Cushing and Lee, as I felt they had a great on screen chemistry with one another. These are films from the days before on-location footage for everything you can and CGI for the rest, and what Hammer was able to accomplish on their backlots was impressive. They are gorgeous films to look at with their elaborate costumes and sets, frequently more akin to a well done stage play than to a modern film, and The Mummy is no exception.
One of the more intriguing things about this particular adaptation is the obvious homage they pay to the original films. One can literally find elements not just from the original Karloff version, but from each of the sequels that were released in the 1940's, all neatly bound up into this film. Hammer manages that feat while at the same time exceeding in quality all of those 1940's sequels, and for that, they should be commended.
Christopher Lee makes a fine mummy. He is the only actor other than Karloff that I've seen so far who can provoke an empathy for his fate as the love-struck tormented high priest Kharis (although actually, Karloff's character in the original was named Imhotep. Universal, for reasons unknown, changed it to Kharis for the first sequel in 1940, The Mummy's Hand, and it's been Kharis in every subsequent sequel or readaptation). While the mummy itself can be a fearsome presence, he's really just a tool being directed by someone else -- and not without good reason. You end up feeling sorry for him as much as fearing him. Overall, Karloff's portrayal in the original goes even a step beyond that in showing the mummy to have been resurrected with his intelligence, spirituality and mystical spell-casting powers intact. Lee shows glimmers of intelligence in his eyes on occasion, but is more a middle ground between Karloff's mummy as a wrinkled and forsaken lovelorn wizard, and the shuffling, brain-dead bandaged zombie of all the 1940's Universal Studios sequels.
Overall, this a colorful and fun film from the glory days of Hammer Studios. You'll get you "mummy's" worth - and that's a wrap!
Movie Review: Visually Beautiful, Tremendously Moody, and a Lot of Fun
Summary: 4 Stars
England's Hammer Studios existed primarily as a distributor--until the low budget 1955 THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT suddenly put the studio on the map. Sensing an untapped market, Hammer began to develop similar titles and by the early 1960s developed a style that mixed Victorian sets and costumes with bouffant hairstyles, bared breasts, and lots of blood. The films were largely responsible for jolting the horror genre back to life on both sides of the Atlantic, as popular in the United States as they were in England.
Released in 1959, THE MUMMY was among Hammer's earliest color films and helped lay out the visual style that come to dominate "Hammer Horror" for more than a decade. Drawing from Universal's 1932 THE MUMMY and 1940 THE MUMMY'S HAND, it opens with a band of Victorian-era archeologists in Egypt, where they discover the lost tomb of Princess Ananka--and in the process unleash a mummy cursed to guard her throughout eternity. It is a curse that follows the men back to England, where they are stalked to their deaths one by one.
Director Terence Fisher and cinematographer Jack Asher worked a number of Hammer films, including the earlier HORROR OF DRACULA and REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Although some of the lighting may give you pause--judging from all the backlighting and colored filters it would seem the ancient Egyptians had mood lighting installed in their tombs--their efforts result in a series of truly arresting visuals; in their hands, bright color is no obsticle to moodiness. The cast plays it out extremely well, with the lovely Yvonne Furneaux a classic Hammer beauty, Peter Cushing as her archeologist husband, and (yes, the posture and bearing really is unmistakeable) Christopher Lee under wraps for the title role.
The DVD contains no extras beyond the original trailer, and although the transfer is not pristine it is nonetheless very good indeed. Hammer Horror may not save the world, but it is often a lot of fun--and THE MUMMY is easily among the studio's best. Recommended.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
Still laughing at the negative voter.