Carry On Teacher (1959)

 "They've taken the pea!"

My very, very slow marathon of the Carry On films continues with this fascinating third film. It's still the '50s, of course, and the format hasn't settled down to that we will soon come to expect. The film is good, but not great. Funny, but not quite hitting the potential that will soon be realised.

The plot is simple; the popular headmaster plans to lreave, so the kids set up a series of practical jokes during a school inspection to ensure he stays. Meanwhile, two comical romances between inspectors and teachers are pursued. That's it. The jokes are quite funny. The cast is superb, but constrained by a certain early tameness in the material.

More fascinating are the social mores on display here. 1959 was only eighteen yesrs before my birth, but it's a world away. The opening sketches evoke St Trinian's and the Bash Street Kids, a hintat the gulf in time that is to come.

The school is a Secondary Modern. Discipline is far stricter than would be thinkable today. Child psychiatry is caricatured and mocked. and yeah, the beating of children is an unbridgeable gulf. In 1959, it was routine correction of children. In 2023, it's kinky sex and decidedly adult. It's interesting to note that all but one of the teachers dislikes caning children, but they all reluctantly accept it as necessary. We can only shudder.

This is quite good. But, more than that, it's fascinating both as an early Carry On and as social history.

Some Like It Hot (1959)

 "I tell ya, it's a whole different sex!"

This is only, I believe, the second film featuring the greatest Marilyn Monroe I've ever blogged, or even seen. It's also, I'm certain, my first film featuring Jack Lemmon. It may also be my first film featuring Tony Curtis. All three performers are, of course, sublime, although Marilyn mesmerises in her own unique fashion. Her charisma is in a class of its own. Also, she is somewhat sexy. Just saying, as one of her (sometimes) bespectacled and geeky gentlemen.

This, thankfully, is not my first Billy Wilder film and, although farce it is, and farce is hardly my favourite type of comedy, farce doesn't get much better than this. The cross-dressing is positively Shakespearean, but it's extraordinary to think that it contributed to a hit film in 1959, when being a gay man was illegal both here and in America and trans rights were unheard of, as they were until so very recently- and we in 2021 are so very, very primitive in that respect, including myself.

This farce is perfectly crafted. The last line is perfect. The script, performances, timing, skewering of the moronic stupidity of Prohibition- all are perfect. This is truly the finest cinematic farce I have ever seen. But what do I know? Nobody's perfect.

Look Back in Anger (1959)

 "I learned at an early age what it was to be angry..."

I've never seen a John Osborne play before, and this film puts me in an awkward position. Firstly, I'm inevitably going to be talking about the play more than the excellently shot prduction and, secondly, this isn't the play itself; it's a screenplay adapted by Nigel Kneale who, while well-known for science fiction of the more intellectual and despairing kind, is a strangely appropriate person to adapt this very '50s howl of existentialist, post-imperial despair.

Because that's what it is. It's existentialist, with Jimmy wrestling with the very '50s angst of finding purpose in a purposeless world, with a certain kind of period ennui. It's about class, in a strangely apolitical way. It's realist, if you're comparing it (as people mainly did) to the likes of Terence Rattigan, although the dialogue is a bit too polished for it to be truly that. It feels vaguely left-wing without necessarily having any coherent political point. It's genuinely good, if simultaneously deep and empty. Yet, ultimately, it's far more dated in 2021 than Rattigan wil ever be. It's poetic, its characters are passionately real, bt ultimately it's not actually about anything.

We're supposed to like Jimmy, the "angry young man", the university graduate who works on a stall, slumming it, as what Douglas Couland would call a "slacker" a few decades later. Yet, good as Richard Burton is, Jimmy is a pretentious, misogynistic arsehole who physically abuses his wife with an iron and seems unmoved at the news he's to become a dad. Yet I have a feeling he's supposed to stand as a sympathetic symbol of university educated, working class young men who feel alienated at.... well, nothing in particular. It would be different if he'd been shown to be aspiring to greater things but struggling at the lack of social mobility, but there's no suggestion of any such thing. There's mention of the American age, of the end of empire, of death. Admittedly it's a rather dull time where people were waiting for the '60s to happen. But, to me, Jimmy is just an unpleasant wanker.

Ths is a good film based on what looks to be a good and thought-provoking play. But, social mores aside, this comes across as old-fashioned in 2021 in ways that Terence Rattigan doesn't.

The Wasp Woman (1959)

"Oh, women!"

This Roger Corman film is, I admit, a bit of a cheat. The picture you see opposite is in no way represented in the film, which shows no women turning into anything resembling wasps until the last ten minutes, and that just brief shots of fairly crap prosthetics, with most of the exciting stuff happening off screen.

And yet... this is actually a pretty impressive B movie, if admittedly most certainly a B movie, with an actual subtext on the subtext of hubris. Even the inevitable dodgy sexual politics, definitely present, are blunted by the fact that Janice, the protagonist, is the boss.

In fact, although the characters are admittedly all ciphers, and the closest thing to a hero is a fairly flat pipe smoking bloke, you can identify with both Janice and the obligatory mad scientist Zinthrop (played by an actor born in 1886 in the Russian Empre of Alexander III, incredibly), in their hubris of wanting both youth and scientific fame respectively. Importantly, the wasp injections do in fact work in rejuvenating Janice until they are taken too far. The film’s faults lie in its budget only; the script is sound and the concept actually quite strong, as one may expect from Corman. Alas, though, there’s very little wasp-related spectacle here.

Sleeping Beauty (1959)

“Now, father, you’re living in the past. This is the fourteenth century!”

I’ve seen many, many Disney Princess films; I’m the father of a little girl who will be Four in a couple of days and it comes with the territory. Mrs Llamastrangler and I are now resigned to living in a house festooned with Disney princesses and the toys thereof. And yet, Cinderella aside, I haven’t blogged them. This is mainly because I haven’t so much sat down and watched them all the way through but had them on in the background for Little Miss Llamastrangler while I do various parenting and hoist things. However, there comes a point where you’ve seen them so many bloody tones that you can justify a blog post.

Sleeping Beauty is one of Little Miss Llamastrangler’s absolute favourites, right up there with The Little Mermaid and the distressingly ubiquitous Frozen. To my forty-one year old eyes it’s a much better structured and plotted film than Cinderella, not needing to pad out the airtime with cat and mouse hi-jinks, and features a splendid baddie in Maleficent and a splendid set of comic foils with the three Good fairies. There is still, of course, a heroine who talks to animals and some very 1950s show tunes about dreams and all that, but it tells the fairytale well and seems to be perfectly designed for its little target audience.

There are only so many bloody times a dad should have to see it, mind...!

Carry On Nurse (1959)

“The sex-mad fools!"

I never did intend to marathon the Carry On films. But here I am accidentally doing the first two in succession so I suppose I am. Just expect it to go rather slowly.

Just as with Carry On Sergeant, a film with which it shares an awful lot, this isn’t yet quite what we think of the franchise. Yes, there is a little in the way of mild double entendres but sex is actually, while important, still treated in a picture postcard and, well, 1959 way.

And it has to be said that there’s an uncomfortable scene early on where sexual assault is casually treated as comedy. This was a comedy commonplace in 1959 but is not nice to see today and, although I can never know, I like to think I would have said that before #MeToo.

There’s no justification for that sort of thing, then or now, but we can at least describe it as an isolated scene. The rest of the film is not, perhaps, quite as good as it’s predecessir and not, certainly, quite pointing to the greatness ahead, but it’s interesting. Interesting to see Kenneth Williams playing another intellectual and, rather than being at all camp, being given a heterosexual romance. Interesting to see Charles Hawtrey being given a highly visible yet rather minor role. Interesting, still, that Sid James isn’t there at all. Yet a young Joan Sims impresses in her debut, Hattie Jacques is wonderful, and Bill Owen is quite shockingly and unrecognisably young.

Still, this film is entertaining enough but never quite catches fire. Why it was the only film in the series to be successful in America is beyond me.

House on Haunted Hill (1959)

"I haven't poisoned it..."

"It's always good to know that."

SPOILERS

Well, that was very good indeed, and not at all what you'd expect from what on the surface of what looks like a typical late 1950s low budget horror flick which does, after all, star Vincent Price at his camp best. Instead we get a fourth wall-breaking, immaculately plotted (well, there are a few holes on reflection bt let us not be churlish: how did Annabelle and Trent know that Loren would hand out guns?) and, above all, gloriously witty.

This is, in the end, a murder mystery without any supernatural elements. Well, other than the heightened sense of reality, but it just about manages to skirt the line. In the Lorens we have one of cinema's most gloriously acidic couples, appropriate considering where one of them ends up, with each cheerfully wanting to murder the other. There's what looks like an unpleasant note of feminine hysteria in the treatment of Nora but this is partly explained. This is far from the square-jawed 1950s Hollywood I'm used to seeing.

Most refreshingly surprising, though, is the witty fourth-wall breaking and the cheerful use of haunted house tropes throughout to heighten the atmosphere and drama. A gloriously fun way to wind down of a Tuesday evening and the best Vincent Price performance I've seen to date.

Behemoth the Sea Monster (1959)

"Behemoth!"

In thought I'd announce the end of that mini-hiatus and the return of normal blogging with a true cinematic classic but, er, something went a bit wrong. Sorry.

Still, this film may be a typically melodramatic Fifties monster movies and oh-so-very-atomic age, played dead straight with dramatic musical stings in the right places, but there's some real quality here. Gene Evans may be a token piece of plywood to draw in American cinemagoers, yes, but Andre Morell, fresh from Quatermass and the Pit, gives a performance that is far more nuanced and charismatic than it needs to be, and the film is well-directed in a way that belies its tiny budget. Best of all, the elderly Willis O'Brien, he of King Kong and The Lost World fame, handles the monster effect and does so with real aplomb.

Mind you, Jack MacGowran's comedy paleontologist is the best thing in it, a welcome piece of comic relief. But, for all its straightforward genre plot, the film allows the tension to build until we have a massive and radioactive dinosaur-cum-plesiosaur in the Thames next to Tower Bridge, and what's not to love about that? I care not that the beast rampaging through London reminds me uncannily of a 1980s Chewits advert; this is a genuinely well-made film and worth seeing if you happen to be fond of this splendid genre.

The Mouse That Roared (1959)

"Even a complete nincompoop like Tully can't spoil this war."

It's a nice idea- an obscure little English-speaking microstate, a kind of Monaco of the Alps, declares war on the USA so they can lose and receive US aid to solve their financial problems but, through a series of mishaps. Accidentally wins. Oh, and it's all against a themic background of nuclear annihilation. It's a great idea on paper, but in practice this is neither funny enough nor clever enough to be more than mildly diverting. Still, Peter Sellers is always good, if never quite as good as his reputation, and William Hartnell always does a great sergeant major.

Still, if you don't insist on your satire being too incisive, the film is entertaining enough. It looks good, it's all very Cold War and there's some nice slapstick with the bomb. But there really isn't all that much to say about it.

The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959)

"I always have a small one before I operate..."

This early Hammer is a bit odd: the opening is genuinely atmospheric, the style of the titles is very Hammer and it feels like an early Hammer. But it's not really a horror film in that there little suspense- and the lack of suspense makes for a short film that feels so much longer. It really drags.

Christopher Lee is good as Pierre, the dignified hero (yes, he plays a hero!), while Anton Diffring phones it in as evil surgeon Georges, who is 104 but looks about 35, having achieved immortality by means of murdering a woman every ten years, and has an inexplicably German accent. Hazel Court impresses as Janine, the female love interest who... well, that basically sums up the character.

The basic plot, from a play by Barre Lyndon, should in theory make a good film in the same way Jekyll and Hyde has several times and yes, there's atmosphere, but the problem is there's never any suspense- and Diffring just doesn't have the charisma to carry the film. The result is a distinct lack of excitement, a rarity with early Hammer when the quality was generally high.

The film's riff on immortality achieved by the murder of others is hardly original although, with its murders of women including a prostitute in the Paris of 1890, and given Robert Holmes' fondness for Hammer, it's a probable influence on the Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng-Chiang. 

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

"You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!""

Oh my. I watched in goggle-eyed amazement as Teenagers from Outer Space unfolded before me, but Plan 9 from Outer Space is a completely different order of magnitude in its badness. Teenagers from Outer Space had terrible acting and special effects and was generally rubbish, and the plot may have been awful but, well, it had a plot. And it seemed to manage the task of basic storytelling quite well. This film, though… it's hard to find the words. But I'm going to have to because, well, that's sort of the point of these reviews.

Let's start with Bela Lugosi. As everybody knows, the footage of him was shot several years previously before he rather conveniently dies, and had to be padded out with scenes of Ed Wood's wife's chiropodist, who was much, much taller, pretending to be him, rather obviously covering his face. It's worse than it sounds, though. The footage of Lugosi that we get it just the same few scenes repeated, and obviously not shot with this film in mind. The other two zombies (the Inspector and Vampira) walk and act like zombies, with arms outstretched, while Lugosi walks like, well, Dracula. It just looks awful. Especially as the film is padded out with so many scenes of Lugosi walking around looking vaguely menacing.

And then there's the plot, such as it is. The aliens' plans make no sense whatsoever. They're supposed to be incredibly powerful, and far more advanced than ourselves, but they worry about a handful of zombies being spotted, and one of them almost suffers death by zombie because their ray gun thingy fails to work. Also, they foolishly invite a bunch of Earthlings on to their flying saucer for a bit of a chinwag. Duuuuh! And the whole point of their scheme is to somehow stop humanity from developing to the point where they will be able to harness the power of sunlight to make a bomb which with destroy the universe. Or possibly just the Solar System. The script is rather unclear on this point. The alien plan appears to mainly involve shouting insults at these armed and warlike Earthlings and, er, telling them about this weapon they don't want them to develop. Er, good plan.

Yes, that really is it, although there are a lot of shockingly bad scenes of stupid humans talking stupidly to one another while the narrator spouts vaguely melodramatic exposition at us. The narration goes beyond cheesiness into a whole other dimension, but we expect that. Much less expected are Vampira, a sort of proto-Goth in 1959, and the alien "ruler" (and why do all alien planets in 1950s sci-fi B-movies just call their leaders "the ruler?"), played by John Breckinridge, scion of one of America's most aristocratic families and with a deeply Brahmin accent to prove it. He's as camp as a row of tents and, according to Wikipedia, went around being openly as gay as a window in the early decades of the twentieth century, which must have taken guts; he seems to have been quite a character. And aside from Vampira he's the only person in the film with any charisma whatsoever.

The special effects are not bad, considering, although I had to raise an eyebrow at the line which described one as being shaped "like a cigar". Er, no it isn't. And if it was, it wouldn't be a flying saucer, would it? And the Hollywood locations look quite good. But otherwise, well… this is car crash cinema. You feel dirty, voyeuristic and twisted, but you can't take your eyes off the screen.

Teenagers from Outer Space (1959)

"I will find you. I will find you. I will find you. I will find you. Aaaargh!"

Yes, it is as bad as it sounds. Bad films have their uses, mind, but they have to be used properly. This isn't so much a film to sit down and watch, as a conversation piece. Alcohol is advised. I didn't actually take any notes for this one, although it wouldn't have made much difference, but I'm reviewing it anyway. I think of it as a challenge to write enough words for a blog post, because there isn't much to mention beyond the hilarity of the dialogue and the acting.

Admittedly the title is interesting. The 1950s were the birth of youth culture and the birth of the concept of "the teenager" and, of course, to many of the older generation they must have seemed so alien that they might as well have been from outer space. So there's a sort of vague social conservatism there. And there's a sort of passive, "apolitical" conservatism throughout, with all the authority figures shown to be upstanding and decent, and 1950's America shown to be a paradise full of kind, hospitable people. Oh, and the flirty lady in the swimming pool gets killed early on, naturally. We can't have any of that kind of behaviour. But… that's as far as we can go with the subtext angle. There isn't even any obvious reference to communism.

Still, the society he finds on Earth makes a great impression on the protagonist, a serious and decent teenager from outer space going by the other-worldly name of, er, Derek. Yes, Derek. And Derek gets into a romantic entanglement with an Earth girl called Betty, played by Dawn Bender who, in stark contrast with e very other member of the cast, can sort of act a bit. It's the 1950's though, so it's all very chaste. Derek dies at the end, because otherwise things might lead to kissing, inappropriate touching and all sorts of beastliness, and we certainly can't have that.

If you're unconvinced by the bad acting, the hilarious dialogue and the fact the main alien is called Derek, then the special effects might lure you in to the, er, delights of this film. The aliens plan to let loose a load of huge, terrible Gargon monsters, which are portrayed by, er, lobsters or, rather, the shadows of lobsters, as lobsters tend to have this unfortunate tendency to be a little smaller than the script requires. The aliens also regularly kill people with ray guns, reducing them to bones, or rather to the same, rather obvious, plastic skeleton.

It gets worse. The final scene features Derek's alien father, sporting the most obvious false beard in the history of cinema. But personally I find myself inspired. Surely, somewhere in the world, there must be a worse B movie than this? The quest begins…

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

“I knew a Watson in Capri- a notorious white slaver. Nice fellow, though. A relation of yours?”

Yes, all right; it didn’t take me long to get back to Hammer. I can’t say there won’t be more in the near future, but there will be a diverse array of other films too, honest, guv.

We get the requisite lettering and weird, unsettling music as the film open with that familiar, Technicolor, stylised landscape which still manages to look unnatural in spite of the fact it was clearly filmed in your actual Dartmoor.

We open with Francis de Wolff narrating a tale of Sir Hugo Baskerville, presiding over a Hellfire Club-style decadent party during the eighteenth century. He’s evil, all right. Not only does he shove a bloke’s head into the fire for objecting to his daughter being kidnapped and abused, he also decides to have said daughter brought down to be gang-raped by all of his equally nasty mates. The girl has escaped, though, and Sir Hugo flies into a rage.

None of this detail is in the book; it’s clearly here to titillate, and makes uncomfortable viewing in our age. We may be less prudish now in 1959, but we’re far less comfortable with the use of implied sexual violence to titillate. Still, Sir Hugo is off hunting, with his sinister pack of hounds. In the dark, Dartmoor landscape we get a strong impression of the Wild Hunt, with its pagan associations of Woden or Herne the Hunter. In contrast to this, the girl takes sanctuary in a church, but this is no escape. Ultimately, though, Sir Hugo is killed by another, monstrous hound which is not quite of this world.

It is now revealed that all this has been narrated to Holmes and Watson by Dr. Mortimer, who seeks to engage Holmes on behalf of the new baronet, Sir Henry Baskerville. And here we meet Holmes (Peter Cushing) and Watson (Andre Morell). Oddly enough, the only real example of Homes’ deductive cleverness comes in his reasoning that Mortimer has really come about events on the previous Friday, glancing at a newspaper.

This film is very much in the house style of other early Hammers, although a little more faithful to the source material than most: the fast pace; the extra little moments of gore and excitement (the tense scene with the spider is a nice little addition!); and, most of all, the little digs at pre-1960s morality by the Angry Young Men generation who are making this film. It may be more deadpan and subtle than, say, the 1960s Batman TV series, but the same sort of humour is there, and Cushing is playing the part straight only in the sense that Adam West did.

Sir Henry is from South Africa, not Canada, presumably so that Lee doesn’t have to attempt a Canadian accent. He’s a rather arrogant, unlikeable, patrician sort. Then again, beneath the surface one suspects that he’s meant to be. Like The Mummy, this is conspicuously set in a world where country gentlemen hold all the power and can do whatever the hell they like. While The Mummy sees an absurdly deferential attitude on behalf of the police to the country gent hero, in this film the country gents decline to bother the pretty little heads of the constabulary at all, in spite of the numerous deaths and in contrast to Conan Doyle’s original novel. Holmes even takes it upon himself to ensure that Mrs Barrymore is not prosecuted. It’s hard not to see some class resentment in the script here; that Sir Henry is so unlikeable is, I suspect, no accident. On the way to Baskerville Hall he even expresses support for capital punishment, the bastard.

Holmes is, incidentally, very much one of these “gentlemen” here; she ostentatiously refuses Mortimer’s offer of a “generous” reward, insisting that his fees are “on a fixed scale, except where I remit them altogether”. Of course, he is in fact quite happy to accept a rather large sum at the end of the film, which rather undercuts this! This is very much the Sherlock Holmes film that Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon would have written.

Oh, and I love the way that everyone pronounces “Devonshire” as “Devonshaaah”!

It’s a joy to see John Le Mesurier as Barrymore but then, of course, it’s a joy to see John Le Mesurier in anything. And, much as Francis de Wolf may be playing Mortimer in a slightly red herring-ish sort of way, it’s obvious that Stapleton is a baddie as soon as we see him. Bishop Frankland, on the other hand, is a figure of pure comic relief, and reminds me very much of the sort of pomposity-puncturing absurd authority figure soon to be seen in the likes of Beyond the Fringe and the rest of the “satire boom”. There’s a particularly hilarious camp moment, played dead straight, where Holmes assures this bibulous, forgetful old dunderhead that he, Holmes, is “fighting evil, as surely as you do”.

The adventures of Watson and Sir Henry as they encounter the escaped convict on the moor leads Sir Henry to start having those heart palpitations that the plot occasionally requires. Watson, of course, prescribes the traditional Hammer remedy of brandy. What else? And, given the amount of alcohol we see being drunk, most of the characters in this film must spend a fair amount of the time half-cut.

I love Holmes’ absurdly dramatic behaviour here; threateningly brandishing a dagger around in front of Mortimer, casually announcing his survival from the collapsing mine, and being deliberately rude to Sir Henry just so he can use him as bait for his final trap for Stapleton.

The conclusion is dramatic, although there is an extra twist from the book; Stapleton’s daughter (as she is here), here named Cecile, is a deliberate conspirator who relishes taunting Sir Henry at the climax, and it is she, not Stapleton, who drowns in the mire.

Another enjoyable Hammer, this, although the format is now becoming amusingly familiar.

The Mummy (1959)

“He’s a foreigner!”

“Well, he can’t help that, poor chap.”

This will be my last Hammer horror film for a bit (there’ll be plenty more, but this blog needs a bit of variety- perhaps a Western next?). It already feels different, though; the specific areas in both Egypt and England (an area where all the working class people seem to be Irish) may be fictional, but this is a far cry from the vague Mittel-Europa settings we’ve seen thus far.

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.