By this point, the Mummy series was solidly in the B side of things. If you recall the end of the Mummy's Ghost, Aminia was the reborn soul of Princess Ananka and Kharis the Mummy (Lon Chaney) finally got ahold of his lost love and dragged her aging body into the swamps of New England. How did they come back for this penultimate round?
We open in Cajun country. Seriously, we're now in the backwoods of Louisiana and the Southern Engineering Company is trying to drain the local swamp. There are problems, though, as the workers seem to be afraid of the local area. It seems twenty-five years ago a mummy ran off into that very same swamp with a girl and no one has dared set foot in there since.
So the Mummy's Ghost took place in 1919 or does this take place in 1969?
Boss Pat Walsh (Addison Richards) thinks this is all nonsense, but two scientists from the Scripps Museum, Dr. Halsey (Dennis Moore) and Dr. Zandaab (Peter Coe), think the legend is real enough to conduct a search for the mummies.
It seems the search bore fruit, maybe, as one of the workers is found dead and beside a large man shaped impression in the mud. Zandaab, as you might guess, is a priest of Arkan and he is the most recent one tasked with finding the Princess Ananka. He would be surprised though, as the princess comes to life in the murky water too, and I mean really alive. Ananka (Virginia Christie) doesn't remember a thing though, but the name Kharis burns in her mind.
She is found by one of Walsh's men and taken to a local pub, owned by the kindly Auntie Berthe (Ann Codee) who lets the girl sleep in the backroom. She isn't there long before Kharis comes crashing through the door and strangles the old woman. Ananka flees into the night and runs into Walsh's camp, where the man's niece Betty (Kay Harding) takes her in. Zandaab's henchman Ragheb (Martin Kosleck), however, has plans for Betty and himself, and they involve the tanna leaves.
This would be the last serious mummy films from Universal for the next 55 years, and it's easy to see why. Plot snarls aplenty, Chaney dragging himself through muck and mud and looking bored while doing that, plus every character is about as one dimensional as you can get, even by 1944's standards.
No comments:
Post a Comment