The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb ** (1964, Terence Morgan, Ronald Howard, Fred Clark, Jeanne Roland, Jack Gwillim, George Pastell, John Paul) – Classic Movie Review 2784

Producer-writer-director Michael Carreras’s 1964 Hammer horror The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb is the first sequel to their 1959 film The Mummy, takes place in 1900 five years after the original, and stars Terence Morgan as the villainous Adam Beauchamp and Fred Clark as the greedy American showman, entrepreneur and investor Alexander King. Mummy films are popular but hard to do, as Carreras discovers here, unable to put a convincing or involving fresh spin on the myth, or successfully reanimate the undead Mummy character.

Ronald Howard, Jeanne Roland and Jack Gwillim also star as European Egyptologists John Bray, Annette Dubois and Sir Giles Dalrymple, who discover the tomb of the Egyptian prince Ra-Antef, the actual son of a Pharaoh. So this is a different undead Mummy character from previous films – not a non-royal character cursed and buried alive as punishment for his transgressions – but it is the same old Mummy business. If Christopher Lee had reappeared after The Mummy, they would no doubt have kept his Kharis character.

P.T. Barnum-style showman King plans to ship their just-discovered contents of Egyptian prince Ra-Antef’s tomb back to England and go on tour to display the treasures and sarcophagus, with The Mummy (Dickie Owen) as a sideshow. Unfortunately, someone has discovered the means of waking the centuries-dead prince, a 5,000 year-old living monster.

However, he is reckoning without the villainous Adam Beauchamp (Terence Morgan), who is also known as Be, the Mummy’s brother, endowed with eternal life.

The story is reasonably set up with a cast of fairly decent actors – though no actual stars – at least trying to do their best for it, albeit without a great deal of success. But Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are desperately missed. Morgan and Howard look glum and wander about wanly, while Clark is a bit of an irritant. Jeanne Roland is pretty but a weak heroine, and very obviously dubbed.

This sluggishly handled, slow-going chiller is disappointingly low-tension horror from the Hammer Films studio boss Carreras, who can’t repeat the success of their 1959 film The Mummy, also produced by Carreras. This time Carreras writes the screenplay as Henry Younger, a jokey nod to Hammer producer Anthony Hinds’s nom-de-plume of John Elder. And here Jimmy Sangster is desperately missed. His The Mummy screenplay is in an entirely different class. Carreras’s effort is a weak, muddled screenplay, throwing in a few scenes of nasty, hand-chopping and head-stamping violence to disguise the lack of action, incident, good dialogue or interesting characters.

Jack Gwillim co-stars as Sir Giles Dalrymple.

Also in the cast are George Pastell as Hashmi Bey, John Paul as Inspector Mackenzie, Jill Mai Meredith as Jenny, Michael Ripper as Achmed, Harold Goodwin, Jimmy Gardner, Vernon Smythe, Marianne Stone, Olga Dickie, Michael McStay, Bernard Rebel and Roy Stewart.

It is made at Associated British Elstree Studios, Shenley Road, Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, England.

It is nicely shot by director of photography Otto Heller in Techniscope and Technicolor, with Carreras using both well. It runs 78 minutes or 81 minutes (US).

The score is by Carlo Martelli, though Franz Reizenstein’s theme from The Mummy (1959) is played during the Egyptian flashback scenes.

Dickie Owen, who plays the Mummy (Ra-Antef), also appears as Hashmi Bey’s thuggish landlord, in a scene with Marianne Stone as Bey’s landlady.

The terrible model ship shot of SS Californian used to represent the archaeologists’ ship returning home transporting the Mummy is taken from the Titanic film A Night to Remember (1958).

Jeanne Roland was born on March 19, 1937 in Rangoon, Burma, as Myrna Jean Rollins, became one of London’s top photographic models in the mid-Sixties, and also appeared in two Bond films, You Only Live Twice (1967) and Casino Royale (1967).

The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb was released as a double bill with The Gorgon (1964) though on US home video it was paired with The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958).

It is followed by The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2784

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