The Mummy's Ghost (1944)

 

                                             

Read/Watch 'em In Order #155

What I love about The Mummy's Ghost (1944) is the casualness with which everyone in a small New England town accepts the idea of undead mummies and Egyptian curses. It's understandable, of course, since they had just had a mummy rampaging through their town not long ago. Now, we get a recap of the first two films via a lecturing college professor. And when Kharis reappears and people start getting strangled to death again, the cops accept that the mummy is back. 

One of those cops is played by Barton Maclane, playing a tough cop in the same hard-boiled manner that he always played tough cops, logically planning a way of trapping a "criminal" who is immune to bullets. I love it. 

As in the previous film, the movie also benefits from the actor playing Kharis' Egyptian "keeper." This time, it's John Carradine, an unfailing professional as an actor who always gave his all in any movie, regardless of that movie's overall quality.

The quality of movie, this time, actually isn't bad. There's a bit of a continuity glitch as the Egyptian cult now seems dedicated to bringing Kharis and Princess Anaka together. This is quite a change in attitude. Remember, after all, that Kharis was cursed to guard Anaka's tomb because his love for her was forbidden. But it does allow this film to go in an unusual direction. Oh, well. The villains in the previous films kept getting distracted from their mission by falling for a pretty girl. Perhaps the cult simply decided that there's no beating True Love. 

After Kharis kills an Egyptologist to get some Tana leaves (the stuff he needs to stay alive), his next mission is to recover Anaka's mummy from a local musuem. But when Carradine's character uses the juice of the Tana leaves to resurrect her, her mummy crumbles into dust. This means, he realizes, that she's been reincarnated into someone else.

That someone else is Amina (Ramsey Ames), who is of Egyptian descent. She's also the girlfriend of the film's bland protagonist, played by Robert Lowery. Eventually, Kharis kidnaps Amina. But when Carradine is about to inject her with Tana juice, he starts to fall for her as well. Seriously, the cult's Human Resources department really needs to put out some guidelines about this sort of thing. Anyway, this situation isn't going to make Kharis happy.

There's a lot of nice touches. The shots of Kharis (played again by Lon Chaney, Jr.) walking up and down elevated railroad tracks to a hideout in an abandoned warehouse look just plain cool. The variation of the usual plot is interesting and the way Amina's hair gradually turns from brunette to grey over the course of the movie is pretty nifty. She is indeed Anaka and she is now rapidly aging. She is, after all, 3000 years old. 

The movie has a bit of a tragic end, with Kharis and Amina/Anaka sinking into a swamp. But this sets up the creepiest scene in the series, which we'll examine when we look at The Mummy's Curse in a few weeks.