Review of The Mummy (1959) by Van R — 21 Oct 2010

"Curse of Frankenstein" director Terence Fisher teamed up again with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in the Hammer Films' remake of the Boris Karloff classic "The Mummy," but this Warner Brothers release, like all other Hammer horror epics, was shot in color.

British archaeologists crack open an Egyptian tomb of Princess Ananka in 1895. Moments before they enter, a fez-wearing native, Mehemet Bey, warns Stephen Banning and Joseph Whemple that they will pay the consequences for desecrating the burial place if they enter.

Naturally, Banning dismisses Bey's warning and ventures inside. While he is observing the inside of the tomb, Banning removes a sacred scroll from a case and reads it aloud. What Banning doesn't know is that the words that he is reading have awakened a 4000-year old mummy and the sight of this heavily-bandaged individual creates so much anxiety that he has a nervous breakdown and winds up in a mental asylum.

Banning's crippled son John (Peter Cushing of "Horror of Dracula") knows nothing about this incident until three years pass and they have returned to England. Nevertheless, Bey refuses to let the crime of their tomb robbing to go unpunished and he brings the mummy, Kharis (Christopher Lee of "Curse of Frankenstein"), to England with him to kill not only Stephen and John Banning, but also Joseph Whemple.

Kharis was sealed up in Princess Ananka's tomb because he tried to use the scroll of Life to bring her corpse back to life. The authorities cut out his tongue so that the Egyptian gods would not have to hear his blasphemous words and they locked him up in the tomb.

Imagine Kharis' surprise when he tries to kill John Banning and the dead, spitting image of Princess Ananka--John's wife Isobel (Yvonne Furneaux of "The Master of Ballantrae")--orders him to stop.

This Hammer remake of the Universal Pictures' classic is almost as good as the Boris Karloff version. Chiefly, the best thing about the Hammer version is that Kharis appears as the mummy repeatedly as he exacts the revenge that Mehemet Bey has revived him to do.