Mummy's Tomb (1942)

 

Read/Watch 'em In Order #153

The Mummy's Tomb was released in 1942, two years after the previous movie. But it's set 30 years after The Mummy's Hand. This retroactively sets Hand in the early 1910s.  The timeline of the Universal Monster movies--and the exact time in which they are set--was always a little elastic. But in this case, the time frames work just fine. There's nothing in Hand to firmly indicate it didn't take place 30 years before it was made. In fact, it actually makes sense, since Egypt in 1940 would have been more concerned with the Afrika Korps than with archeology. 

Anyway, Dick Foran and Wallace Ford are back as Steve Banning and Babe Hanson. Now, though, they are made up as old men. Steve is a widower and has a grown son. 

George Zucco also makes a reappearance. He was shot by Babe in the first film, but it turns out he survived. The mummy Kharis had been set on fire, but he was apparently only singed. 

Anyway, Zucco's character assigns Mehemet Bey (played by Turhan Bey) to take Kharis to the U.S. and wreak vengence on the entire Banning family. As the book Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films 1931-1946 (1990: written by Michael Brunas, John Brunas and Tom Weaver) points out, there's no explanation why the bad guys wait 30 years before instituting this plan.

I remember how surprised I was when I first saw this film when the stars of the first film (both Steve and Babe) end up getting ruthlessly killed by Kharis so early in the film. Steve's sister is also killed. The 30-year time jump helps make this a little more palatible, since both men are implied to have lived full lives, but it was still a shock. This cycle of Mummy movies aren't the equal to the true classics, but I still liked Steve and Babe. 

 Steve's son John and the cops eventually tumble to the existance of Kharis. 

Mehemet Bey, in the meantime, takes a liking to John's girlfriend and has Kharis kidnap her. This brings everything to a head as John and a torch-bearing posse kill Bey and run the mummy into an abandoned mansion, where the mummy is presumably killed in a fire. But fire didn't completely destroy Kharis in the last film, did it?

By necessity, the 60-minute film moves along at a brisk pace. In fact, the first ten minutes taken up by a flashback to recount the important points from The Mummy's Hand, so there's really only 50 minutes to tell the new story. Univeral Horrors is justly critical of the film in this regard:

"There is a pointed emphasis on speed and efficiency at the expense of character development and atmosphere." (page 318)

All the same, I like the movie. Turhan Bey stands out in his performance as the bad guy. Lon Chaney, Jr. takes over the role of Kharis and, though he isn't given a chance to give the monster any real personality, he does make an effective unstoppable killing machine. And the ending, set in that burning mansion with John Banning fighting to rescue his girl and escape, is quite good. On a more minor but very entertaining point, I do enjoy that the good guys eventually decide that they are indeed pursing a 3000-year-old undead killer based on crime scene forensics. 

This, though, is not the end of Kharis.