“He’s a foreigner!”
“Well, he can’t help that, poor chap.”
This is the first time I’ve seen a proper mummy movie, but it amuses me how many of the tropes I recognise from popular culture, and not least certain episodes of Doctor Who. It isn’t the best Hammer horror but it’s entertaining enough once it gets going. This takes some time, though. This is a no-frills journey through the standard tropes, played dead straight, sort of. Like other early Hammers, there’s definitely an element of camp ironic humour, but it’s as deadpan as deadpan can be.
We begin in colonial Egypt, in 1895. Archaeologist Stephen Banning, his brother Joseph, and John, his son with a gammy leg (Peter Cushing) have spent ages looking for the hidden tomb of Ananka, an ancient high priestess. An Egyptian chap in a fez (cool!) played by the splendid George Pastell delivers the sort of warning of dire consequences which are de rigeur for these sorts of films, but this doesn’t deter John. He enters the revealed tomb, and it’s completely undisturbed. The inside of the tomb, incidentally, looks magnificent.
It all happens very fast; we hear a scream, and suddenly we’re in England three years later. Stephen is in a mental institution, John has an even gammier leg and none of them seem remotely capable of going more than ten seconds without lighting a cigar or pouring a glass of whisky.
After years of being completely out of it, Stephen wakes up and warns John of “the mummy”. Other things are afoot, too; that Egyptian chap is nearby, and we discover that drinking and driving was rife in the 1890s. Tsk. This leads to their cargo, a mysterious Egyptian casket, falling into a conveniently placed swamp. This seems not to upset the Egyptian bloke, though. Look at his face. Is he bovvered?
Later, Egyptian bloke reads the scroll and brings the mummy to life. It’s rather muddy and visually engaging. It seems such a waste of Christopher Lee to just put him in bandages like this. Still, the following scene, a nice bit of exposition from John, quickly segues into an extended flashback where Christopher Lee gets to play Kharis, during life as an Egyptian priest, and not only gets a good few lines but ends up looking really rather cool. Still, it’s always a shock to see how small a role Lee tends to play in these early Hammers.
These scenes of Ananka’s death rites feature some genuinely horrifying scenes, and this is where the film starts to wake up. The scenes of the handmaidens calmly bowing their heads, awaiting decapitation and death so they can serve the princess in the afterlife, make quite an impression as the camera cuts away and instead we hear the swords strike. The horror grows as Kharis returns at night, blasphemously, to attempt the resurrection of the woman he secretly and illicitly loved. He is caught, and doomed to an awful fate. The scene where his tongue cut out is the most horrible thing I have ever seen- the camera cuts away as the sword hits the tongue, but the process up to this point is quite graphic.
Kharis is sentenced to be buried alive, ready to be brought back to life to avenge any desecration of his beloved’s tomb. And, the backstory now revealed, the mummy is sent forth by Egyptian Bloke to kill Uncle Joseph. John fails to stop him, but manages to let off a load of gunshots which, naturally, entirely fail to kill the mummy.
Then we get the really shocking bit: John casually admits to a police inspector (with an uncanny resemblance to Nicolas Sarkozy and an inexplicably North American accent) that he shot the murderer several times, and there’s absolutely no suggestion of any legal trouble whatsoever. Even more incredibly, he tells the inspector everything and, while the inspector is at least sceptical, you’re left with the impression that the police are extraordinarily deferential to country gents on Planet Hammer.
John knows the mummy is after him, though, and we’re not surprised to see the Egyptian Bloke send it to kill him. At this point John’s wife, Isobel, the only woman in the film, finally gets the first of what must be less than a dozen lines. The character is a complete doormat. John “orders” her to lock herself away while he waits for the mummy. It’s feminism gone mad.
Oh, and John’s wife is the very image of Ananka, it seems, and the mummy promptly buggers off for a bit. It there anyone who’s seen this film and didn’t immediately guess the entire rest of the plot at this point?
Conveniently, the inspector has been making enquiries which lead him now to believe John’s story. He tells John that under no circumstances whatsoever should he make contact with Egyptian Bloke so, naturally, he does exactly that. It seems his actual name is Mehemet Atkill, which sounds Turkish rather than Arabic, but never mind. It’s amusing to see John’s staggering lack of tact in scoffing at those who worship the god Karnak- in real life not a god at all but a temple complex near Thebes. I don’t think John realises that the man facing him worships this god; he’s just not very bright, is he?
Inevitably, Mehemet and the mummy come after John, but he’s expected. The mummy is about to kill John, but again he sees Isobel. When Mehemet tells him to kill Isobel, he is casually killed, and things start to go all King Kong as the mummy takes Isobel into the swamp. This is a bit of a weird love triangle- I wonder which of them Isobel prefers? Probably the mummy. I can’t imagine John would be much good in bed. Alas, he puts her down, and gets riddled with bullets.
It’s a film of two halves, really, this. But it’s probably short enough to be worth seeing.
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