The Mummy's Tomb (1942)

Film: The Mummy's Tomb (1942)
Stars: Lon Chaney, Jr., Dick Foran, John Hubbard, Elyse Knox, George Zucco, Wallace Ford, Turhan Bey
Director: Harold Young
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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 going to be encountering our second (and for this month, at least, final) outing with the Mummy, one of the more repeated monsters from the Universal canon during the "Golden Age" of Universal monsters.  This film marks our first outing in 2020 with a Lon Chaney (in this case, Junior as the Mummy).  The Chaneys were huge stars of the horror genre, and some of the bigger names to come out of this era of moviemaking.  If you've read past reviews I've done in other seasons of this series (see below), you'll find that while I enjoy the elder Chaney, I'm not wild about Junior.  His characters are kind of lugheaded, and never have the expressiveness that we'd expect from someone as talented as Boris Karloff, the original Mummy.  I was curious if he was playing a mute, frequently doesn't even speak character like Kharis, if that would translate better onscreen.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place 30 years after The Mummy's Hand, and begins in flashbacks to the previous film where a now older Stephen Banning (still played by Foran) takes us through his adventures with Kharis, and how he ended up marrying his wife, now deceased, whom he saved from the Monster.  We cut back to Egypt, where Kharis is being reawakened by Adhodeb (Zucco), who we assume is about to die, and instructs his follower Mehemet Bey (Bey) to enact revenge on the Banning clan, going to America and having Kharis (Chaney) kill all of the living members of the Banning family.  He does this, with both Stephen and Babe (Ford, who was also in the previous film) dying at the mummy's hand in short cameos, while our young lovers John (Hubbard) and Isobel (Knox) are trying to understand how to stay safe.  As is inevitable, Mehemet falls for the beautiful Isobel, and captures her to be his bride, but before he can, he is killed by a mob tracking down the Mummy, and the Mummy is burned (which leads to the happy ending of John & Isobel getting married).

The first thing that strikes me about this movie is the sequel nature of the film.  Movie serials were relatively common in the 1930's and 40's before the advent of television, but it's worth keeping in mind that until the 1980's, there was no obvious way to keep track of characters over multiple years.  You didn't have movies, and in the early 1940's the only way you'd see a movie like the The Mummy's Hand in advance of The Mummy's Tomb is through the film being re-released in theaters.  This is interesting to me because The Mummy's Tomb does a decent job of being continuation of the story-the opening scenes with the last movie are helpful, but I'll be honest here-if I hadn't just seen The Mummy's Hand the week before, I might not have noticed the attention-to-detail of having three actors from the previous film coming back in the same roles.  In my experience this is unusual, as most of the Universal movies will recast or completely upend the setting so it's not necessary for you to have seen the previous film, and made me wonder a year from now when we do another season (and I hopefully give the next two Mummy movies their due) whether or not I'll have to rewatch these films for context.

This, unfortunately is the only really fascinating thing about The Mummy's Tomb.  The story is more succinct than the last film, but the acting is worse, and Hubbard & Knox are hopelessly generic.  Chaney adds little to the Mummy other than to make him a brute-there's none of the sensitivity that Karloff brought to the character, and he's largely upstaged onscreen by Bey's (problematic) Mehemet.  Overall, this is confirmation for me three (of the five) films in that the Mummy franchise is the least of the Universal horror films in retrospect.  On Tuesday, we'll leave him behind and go for arguably the best creature in the canon, so make sure to stick around as we enter the final two weeks of our Month of Horror.

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, Werewolf of London, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The House of Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Masque of the Red Death