The Mummy's Curse (1944)

Film: The Mummy's Curse (1944)

Stars: Lon Chaney, Jr., Dennis Moore, Kay Harding, Virginia Christine

Director: Leslie Goodwins

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

We are finishing off The Mummy series with The Mummy's Curse, the fifth in the long line of increasingly similar Mummy movies.  I will be honest here-I'm struggling with how to discuss this particular movie mostly because the movie has virtually nothing to differentiate it from the remainder of the Mummy franchise features.  It's shocking watching these movies to understand just how identical the movies are not just to each other, but how frequently the 1999 tale of The Mummy borrows from this plotline (with better effect).

(Spoilers Ahead) Once again, we are told the story of Kharis (Chaney) & his doomed love with Ananka (Christine).  The movie takes place in New Orleans, which you'd think might add some ambience to the tired plot (I'm honestly not going to go over the story in-depth here, suffice it to say the Mummy & Ananka do not end up together or happy by the film's ending), but instead it just lands us a solid amount of racism to go along with our traditional Mummy motif.  Kharis storms about, trying once again to reunite with Ananka, the villagers are initially skeptical (to their ridiculous doom), and in the end Kharis is crushed, this time for real since we would not get another Lon Chaney, Jr. movie in the franchise (famed stuntman Eddie Parker would don the guise in Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, a considerably better film we'll get to next week).

If you can't tell, I'm not enthused by this.  We might do a bit of a retrospective at the end of this series (I'm debating whether or not to do a list on the three-years of horror films or not, particularly when it comes to the canon Universal Monster movies, as I'll have seen all thirty by the time this month is done), but of all of the series, The Mummy is easily the one with the most diminishing returns.  With the exception of Boris Karloff's initial picture, they are virtually indistinguishable from each other.  Even here, when the movie completely (and without warning) changes both the location of the swamp from our last movie and the time frame (this movie, if we were to go with the chronology presented in the movie, takes place in the 1990's), there's not much that makes it disappear from the other Mummy's hand/tomb/ghost.

So what we're left with is a pretty disposable picture, and I kind of wonder if the endless cascade of sequels might be why horror doesn't get the respect that it deserves today in film.  We have seen in recent years a lot of elevated horror performances like Toni Collette in Hereditary or Lupita Nyong'o in Us that the Academy ignores, despite these being among the best films of the year.  There are some solid performances in the Universal canon, especially in the early years.  I haven't finalized my lists from the respective years (lots more to see before I finish the "My Ballots"), but know that Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester, & Claude Rains are all on my shortlists for performances they've given in these films.  One wonders if genre bias & the horror genre getting treated so nonchalantly (not entirely without merit, as this movie indicates) has caused some of that prejudice today.  Something to consider as we close out the remaining week of our season of horror, particularly next week when we get into one of the more famous horror films of this era.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Mummy's Ghost, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Revenge of the Creature, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob, The Masque of the Red Death