The Mummy's Hand (Christy Cabanne, 1940) is an inferior Universal Horror film, cheaply made and poorly acted. In general, the mummy pictures produced after the eccentric and spectacularly shot 1936 inaugural effort, Karl Freund's The Mummy (with Boris Karloff) are inept and, in fact, tend toward the risible. In real life, Egyptian mummies are frail, leathery artifacts so convincingly moribund that it is simply impossible to imagine them revived, let alone, stalking about killing people. Since mummies themselves, although repulsive, are not particularly frightening, these films exploit other sources of horror -- ultimately, mummy monsters represent our fear of confinement and paralysis: someone is always buried alive in these pictures with a ghastly close-up of staring terror-struck eyes bulging as gauze is implacably wrapped around the immobilized but still animate face of the victim, generally a lustful high-priest, about to be interred living in a grandiose sarcophagus in some dismal torch-lit granite tomb. The rules of engagement with mummies are not well understood -- shooting won't harm an undead Egyptian but they can be burnt and, in fact, the hundreds of yards of gauze wrapping enclosing the undead corpse serves as an effective tinder. With black staring eyes and a withered round anal aperture for mouth, mummies also, I think, embody some primordial fears about being burned, or about the appearance of burn victims. The monstrous mummy looks like the victim of fire or some other kind of disastrous surgical procedure and seems horrible in that regard -- but this horror is founded upon repulsion, aversion, and, even, a kind of pity. To become a mummy, one must suffer quite extraordinarily and the compensation of eternal life isn't much fun if you have to spend eternity limping around like a person who has suffered hemiparesis as a result of a stroke -- mummies have one bad arm crimped up close to the torso and a leg with severe foot-drop that they haul behind themselves as they stalk forward. Mummies have to corner their victims -- a toddler could outrun one of these creatures. After Freund's version, the series went downhill fast, due, in part, to sheer and arrogant laziness on the part of the screenwriters, and the second installment in the franchise is already terrible.
A lustful priest enamored with the princess Ananka gets himself mummified alive. (Later, when he's discovered someone touches him and says: Why it's as if he's alive?" The other actor's rejoinder is classic: "What marvelous embalming!" -- exactly how you can be both alive and embalmed is left to the audience's imagination). An American soldier-of-fortune with his buddy, a reject from the Bowery Boys, discovers an artifact that points the way to the tomb. The tomb, which looks like a Mayan Temple, complete with an obviously Mayan bas relief on its top, is guarded by a sinister fez-wearing high priest who is also conveniently the chief Egyptologist at the Cairo Museum. To reach the tomb, you have to ride a camel shown in close-up trudging through sand only to arrive at... a hillside obviously located in California.) An American magician and con-man with a lissome, beautiful daughter joins the expedition to loot the tomb of Princess Ananka. A highly Semitic-looking beggar (he looks like Fagin from Oliver Twist) first seen in the bazaar in Cairo lurks around the edges of the action conspiring with the Shriner High Priest to unleash his unfortunate precursor, Kharis, the undead mummy on the looters. Kharis strangles the chief archaeologist, a crime that doesn't really bother anyone at all and something that all the characters seem to forget as soon as the dastardly deed is accomplished. People get into a high dudgeon, however, when the mummy snatches the girl. She's wearing slinky white silk lingerie like a 'roaring twenties' gun moll and reclines gracefully in the embrace of the mummy who drags her to the tomb where the fez-wearing High Priest decides to make her into another animate corpse so that he can be her consort for all eternity. (This will leave for Kharis without a mate, but he's readily controlled -- cut off his tea made from broiled tanna leaves and he will go back to sleep for another couple eons.) There's a fist fight between the burly looter and the poor mummy gets lit on fire after absorbing a dozen or so revolver shots to the torso. The final scenes take place in an underground temple with huge statues of jackals posing above what seems to be a vast Mormon-style baptismal font. There are about four good shots in the 67 minute movie -- a jackal howls at the sky in which the moon glows swathed in cloud, the mummy looks in on the negligee-wearing girl, shocking her into a dead faint -- he has a quizzical look on his face with deep black puppy-dog eyes and an anal pucker for a mouth and seems so sad and helpless that, for a moment, at least, you're rooting for the monster. There's a good scene of an ancient Egyptian burial, ebony slaves killed by spears so no one can locate the sepulchral chamber, and, at last, an impressive overhead crane shot of the underground tomb with the twenty-foot tall Anubis-headed gods and a black basin big enough to hold a dozen bathers or a half-dozen LDS confirmands at their baptism. The rest of the film is garbage and so bad that you inevitably sense that the movie is mocking itself -- one archaeologist is famous for unearthing "Inca tombs in Mexico" and the Americans have no motive except looting and desecration. In fact, they deserve the mummy's somewhat inefficient revenge.
(I tuned in two hours later and found that by The Mummy's Curse, released in 1946, production values had further declined. Here the mummy is stalking about a backlot that is supposed to represent a Louisiana bayou -- apparently, left over from some other film. The mummy's tomb no longer bears any semblance to an archaeological site -- it has now become a ruined monastery which looks like nothing other than one crumbling wall with a prison cell door built into it. Long shots of the monastery are obviously matte shots painted on the glass lens and the set is a hulking outline that doesn't even seem to have an interior. The mummy stumbles into a tent, pulls out the lissome fainting woman in white lingerie (this effect remains unaltered) but, as the walking corpse exits the tent, he knocks it down much to the consternation of the other sleepers who flail around comically under the canvas. An amusing African-American with popping eyes runs around in a distracted way -- his name is Goobie and he summons the armed white men who put an end to the mummy, this time yanking down the one crumbling wall comprising the film's single set to bury the poor undead High Priest in a noisy avalanche of Styrofoam bricks and rubble. In the six years between the movies, the budget has gone from low to non-existent.)
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