Review of Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971) by Donovan D — 15 Apr 2008

My varied cinematic diet has long included forays into cheesey sci-fi and horror, most notably Ed Wood's classics. While such films are not necessarily 'good' by the usual standards we use to judge works of cinema, if you accept them for what they are they can be great fun. Given that my expectations are automatically set to their lowest setting when it comes to such films, it was with great surprise that one of my grindhouse horror selections turned out to be not quite a grindhouse film at all, but a genuinely good (if somewhat cheap) horror film from the waning days of Hammer Film Productions.

An adaptation of Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars, Blood from the Mummy's Tomb is quite typical of the Mummy film formula, except in this case the mummy is a woman. As is to be expected with this twist on the form, rather than the shambolic corpse Karloff rip-offs that usually litter the genre, the female mummy is perfectly preserved - and a looker to boot. The attractive and voluptuous English actress Valerie Leon plays a dual role as both the mummy and as a modern-day woman born in her image, and she largely carries the film in what would sadly prove her only lead role. It is to the credit of the filmmakers that while the film's wardrobe flatters Valerie Leon's impressively shapely figure, it never dips into the type of nudie exploitation one might expect from a 70s horror film.

Speaking of filmmakers, Blood from the Mummy's Tomb is notorious for its supposed real-life curse that saw the film's director Seth Holt die during the second last week of filming, and also saw original star Peter Cushing replaced by Andrew Keir after his wife became seriously ill. In spite of a few laughably cheap scenes (a scene of an automobile accident in particular), Blood from the Mummy's Tomb is a respectable last work for Holt, and while its resurgence has largely been due to a cult following, its a film that surpasses its limitations admirably.