Review of The Mummy's Ghost (1944) by Steve M — 22 Jul 2006

The Mummy's Ghost.

Starring: John Carradine, Ramsey Ames, Robert Lowery, George Zucco, and Lon Chaney.

Director: Reginald Le Borg.

Modern day priests of ancient Egyptian gods (Zucco and Carradine) undertake a mission to retrieve the cursed mummy of Princess Ananka from the American musem where she's been kept for the past 30 years. Unfortunately, they discover that the archeologists who brought stole her away from Egypt broke the spell that kept her soul trapped in the mummy and that she has been reincarnated as the beautiful Amina (Ames), an American of Egyptian heritage.

"The Mummy's Ghost" starts out strong. In fact, it starts so strong that, despite the fact that the priests who must be laughing stock of evil cult set were back with pretty much the exact same scheme for the third time (go to America and send Kharis the Mummy stumbling around to do stuff, that it looked like the filmmakers may have found their way back to the qualities that made "The Mummy" such a cool picture.

Despite a really obnoxious love interest for Amina (Lowery) and a non-explained complete ressurection of Kharis (yes... there's no "ghost" here, except, perhaps the reincarnated Ananka... because boiling tannith leaves now apparently reconstitute AND summon a mummy that was burned to ashes in a house-fire during "The Mummy's Tomb), and a number of glaring continuity errors with the preceeding films (the cult devoted to Ananka and Kharis has changed their name... perhas because they HAD become the laughing stock among the other evil cults), the film is actually pretty good for about half its running time. The plight of and growing threat toward Amina lays a great foundation.

And then it takes a sharp nosedive into The Suck where it keeps burrowing downward in search of the bottom.

The cool idea that the film started with (Ananka's cursed soul has escaped into the body of a living person... and that person must now be destroyed to maintain the curse of the gods) withers away under a repeat (for the third time) of the evil priest deciding he wants to do the horizontal mambo for all enternity with the lovely female lead, and with a nonsensical ending where the curses of Egypt's ancient gods lash out in the modern world. (I can't go into details without spoiling the ending, but it left such a bad taste in my mouth, and it's such a complete destruction of the cool set-up that started the film that the final minute costs "The Mummy's Ghost" a full Tomato all by itself.

With garbage scripts like this, one can easily understand why Universal's successful horror franchises were dead husks by the end of the 1940s.