THE MUMMY'S HAND (1940)
For who shall defile the temples of the ancient gods, a cruel and violent death shall be his fate, and never shall his soul find rest unto eternity. --Creepy High Priest dude
Last time, I got a bit exercised about the racial content in the first Mummy film. THE MUMMY'S HAND commits the worse sin of blandness. This is the way of things: the original Universal Horror monster films are avant garde, amazing meditations on what it means to be human. The sequels are potboilers.
THE MUMMY'S HAND is not a continuation of THE MUMMY (1932), but sort of a remake, without the mystery of Ardath Bey or the grasping hand of love reaching 3,000 years forward into the present. Instead of Imhotep, the living mummy in this film is Kharis, buried alive under similar circumstances as his predecessor (with even some reused footage in the establishing flashbacks). Kharis had his tongue cut out, and he's kind of gimpy and inarticulate, committing murder at the bidding of his masters, who control him by withholding the potion needed to animate his corpse, er body I guess. Whereas Imhotep was seductive and menacing, Kharis, who shows up about 40 minutes into the 67 minutes of the film, shambles in a manner familiar from daytime cartoons. Still, the movie gets a lot more fun when he arrives, and starts to feel even cozily familiar. Keep in mind that classic Universal horror movies are nothing like today's horror films--they use composition which is classical or even expressionist and thrill you by being extremely subversive, eschewing the modern crutches of handheld cameras, jump scares, and gore. But while Kharis the supernatural killing drone lurked in the woods waiting to pick off members of the archeological expedition one by one as they searched for the tomb of his mouldering girlfriend, I saw the grandfather of Jason Voorhees at work. It was cool.
Yeah but... they could have tried harder.
Universal Classic Horror Blog Series Rating:
4 - For everyone
3 - For horror fans only
2 - For classic horror fans only
1 - For Pete's sake
0 - Paging MST3K
Last time, I got a bit exercised about the racial content in the first Mummy film. THE MUMMY'S HAND commits the worse sin of blandness. This is the way of things: the original Universal Horror monster films are avant garde, amazing meditations on what it means to be human. The sequels are potboilers.
THE MUMMY'S HAND is not a continuation of THE MUMMY (1932), but sort of a remake, without the mystery of Ardath Bey or the grasping hand of love reaching 3,000 years forward into the present. Instead of Imhotep, the living mummy in this film is Kharis, buried alive under similar circumstances as his predecessor (with even some reused footage in the establishing flashbacks). Kharis had his tongue cut out, and he's kind of gimpy and inarticulate, committing murder at the bidding of his masters, who control him by withholding the potion needed to animate his corpse, er body I guess. Whereas Imhotep was seductive and menacing, Kharis, who shows up about 40 minutes into the 67 minutes of the film, shambles in a manner familiar from daytime cartoons. Still, the movie gets a lot more fun when he arrives, and starts to feel even cozily familiar. Keep in mind that classic Universal horror movies are nothing like today's horror films--they use composition which is classical or even expressionist and thrill you by being extremely subversive, eschewing the modern crutches of handheld cameras, jump scares, and gore. But while Kharis the supernatural killing drone lurked in the woods waiting to pick off members of the archeological expedition one by one as they searched for the tomb of his mouldering girlfriend, I saw the grandfather of Jason Voorhees at work. It was cool.
Yeah but... they could have tried harder.
Universal Classic Horror Blog Series Rating:
4 - For everyone
3 - For horror fans only
2 - For classic horror fans only
1 - For Pete's sake
0 - Paging MST3K