Oh, Hons, This "Mummy" Does Not A Mother Make!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                     A word I do not use often, but should, is perfunctory.  When stopping to think  about it, I  suppose it  is the worst  word one could bestow on a product.  Good and  bad is one thing;  it makes an impression.  Camp is another.  Perfunctory suggests the product set out to  do that--and no  more.  It is like damning with faint praise.

                                        Hammer's film  of "The Mummy" was, at best, perfunctory.  Still, I learned several  things from it.

                                          Hammer's idea of redoing the Universal  classics was to simply add technicolor and gore. Big deal. Forget about atmosphere,  or acting.

                                           What is more,  this  "Mummy" combines  several of the Universal films, contradicting itself along the  way.  The Egyptian sets and  costumes look borrowed  from  DeMille's 1956 "The Ten  Commandments," while everything else looks so obviously shot on  a sound stage, it detracts from  any atmosphere there might have been.

                                               The plot  of the  original  and  "The  Mummy's  Ghost" (1944) are combined.  Christopher Lee plays Kharis, who, in  the  Karoloff  original, was called Imhotep.  Kharis did not  show  up  until 1940, when  Universal made "The Mummy's Hand."  For desecrating the  tomb of  Princes  Ananka, his beloved, his  tongue is  cut out, he  is  mummified and  entombed--alive.(Even for 1959, this sequnce was pretty graphic.  The 1932 version was less graphic, but I am still haunted more by that scene than the one reenacted here.)  But forty centuries later, along  comes John  Banning (Peter Cushing), with his father (Felix Aylmer) and  uncle,  to  find Ananka's tomb,  bringing her back  to England.  That is when George Pastell, as Mehemet  Bey, (no relation to actor  Turhan Bey,  who  appeared in some  of  the Universal  "Mummy" movies) an acolyte of the God,  Karlac, and the actor who gives the film's campiest performance, resurrects Kharis, who, recalling his  love for  Ananka, sets  out in  search for her.  Bey's  goal  is  to have Kharis wreak  revenge--ie; death--on  the desecrators  of Ananka's tomb.

                                                 What a mish-mash. John Banning's wife, Isobel (Yvonne Furneaux)  turns out to resemble Ananka, so Kharis  is powerless to  follow  Bey's orders.  He tries to  save her, and this leads  to  the  climax, borrowed  from "The Mummy's Ghost," where he walks into the swamp, and  is shot,  but not before handing over Isobel to  Banning.  Bey has been killed--what a vicious queen!!!!!!!!!!!!  But that  Kharis gets  shot is preposterous, when,  scenes earlier,  it was shownbullets go right through him!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   

                                                        Poor Christopher Lee; what a thankless role,  I hope he was  paid well.  "The Mummy" may not be  the  worst film  "Svengoolie" showed; I think  that still  belongs to "Curse Of The  Undead"--another 1959 product-- but it is, as I have said, merely perfunctory, neither very good, nor very sound.

                                                           Don't waste the masking tape on  this one, darlings!!!!!!!!!!!!!