The Mummy’s Tomb **½ (1942, Lon Chaney Jr, Turhan Bey, George Zucco, Dick Foran, Wallace Ford, John Hubbard) – Classic Movie Review 3299

Lon Chaney Jnr takes over from Tom Tyler as Kharis the Mummy in director Harold Young’s slightly less good 1942 sequel to The Mummy’s Hand (1940).

This time the living Mummy is sent to America with a high priest to seek murderous revenge on the defilers of the sacred tomb of the Egyptian princess Ananka 30 years earlier. The screenplay by Griffin Jay and Henry Sucher revisits the now very familiar characters and plotlines without, alas, adding anything much that is new. It does, though, still have some effective scenes and performances.

Even with a very short 61 minute running time, it relies heavily on flashbacks to its 1940 predecessor – well as using footage from the classic Universal 1931 Frankenstein! Unfortunately, the Universal studio’s cost-cutting efforts are not the sign of a genre on the rise, despite the continuing and apparently eternal popularity of the Mummy as a monster.

Also in the very good cast are Turhan Bey as Mehemet Bey, George Zucco as Andoheb, Dick Foran as Stephen Banning, Wallace Ford as Babe Hanson, Elyse Knox as Isobel Evans, John Hubbard as Dr John Banning, Mary Gordon as Jane Banning, Virginia Brissac as Mrs Ella Evans, Cliff Clark as the Sheriff, Frank Reicher as Professor Matthew Norman, Paul E Burns as Jim the Caretaker, Emmett Vogan as the coroner and Glenn Strange.

Hammer Films took over the moribund Universal franchise in the late 1950s. After The Mummy in 1959 and The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb in 1964 and The Mummy’s Shroud 1967 The Mummy genre was more successfully revived by Hammer Films in Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1972) before its eventual flourishing in the age of CGI with The Mummy (1999). Tom Cruise fights the monster in The Mummy (2017).

Turhan Bey died on September 30 2012, aged 90.

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© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3299

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