Your breakfast consumed, you sit in a comfy chair by the fireplace, a cup of strong herbal tea steaming beside you. All of a sudden you feel a gentle tap on your shoulder.
Sorry to bother you. My name is Steven Banner, I’m an archaeologist from the mainland. I hope you don’t mind me intruding but it’s just, you have the look of a mainlander yourself, am I right in my observation?
Oh good! Wonderful! May I join you?
I’m sure you think me mad, but I’m telling you, the Egyptians came here, she came here, the Princess, I’m sure of it. The locals tell me I’m wrong, oh they’re nice enough in how they say it, but I don’t like the look in their eyes, they’re hiding something, they don’t like us mainlanders, you’ll find that soon enough.
So what do you say, will you meet me there? I’ve marked the location on this map.
He looks up suddenly, his eyes darting about the room, he stands quickly, speaking overly loud.
Mad am I? I take my leave of you then, good day!
Then in a lower voice.
Come soon…
Some of you may consider the previous review’s film Alien to be ‘pretty old’, and indeed, 1979 was 43 years ago! Today’s film however, came out almost as many years before that, in 1940.
This time I’m reviewing the first of Universal’s Kharis Mummy films, The Mummy’s Hand. Not the first Mummy film from Universal, that would be 1932’s The Mummy, but that film is unrelated, staring Boris Karloff as a very different Mummy named Imhotep.
Chances are that if you imagine the mummy, you are thinking of a shambling, bandaged, killer. That is exactly the mummy that you get in this film, and it is perhaps the earliest example of that stereotype.
The plot follows two American archaeologists searching for the tomb of an Egyptian princess. Along the way they befriend a Magician and his daughter and run afoul of an Egyptian priest and the re-animated mummy Kharis.
When watching films from this far back you have to view them with a somewhat different mindset. The 1940’s is one of the more sterile eras of filmmaking. We are past the introduction of the Hays Code, but before there was much push back against it. There’s no gore, or even much in the way of violence, characters die but it’s all very tame. When it comes to flirting and relationships there’s not even a hint that the characters are anything other than perfectly prim and proper.
If you are capable of watching most recent horror films then this film is not going to scare you, you’d be hard pressed to find a horror film from this period which would. Having said this Kharis himself, played by Tom Tyler, does a good job of appearing creepy and menacing, particularly the shots of him looking towards the camera with those dead black eyes. To modern audiences it’s not very scary but at the time it was probably very effective.
The story itself is decent and compelling if a little disjointed and unnecessary at times, it’s nicely paced, it has to be, the film is after all only 67 minutes long! The main characters are fun, in fact the first half of the film is more comedy than horror with the duo of Steve Banning and Babe Jenson providing a few laughs, particularly once they meet the magician Solvani. The second part of the film becomes more what you would expect with Egyptian tombs, rituals and murder, if you’ve seen the 1999 version of The Mummy then you can see some of it’s roots here.
There’s some nice sets and the scale of the film is good for a lower budget offering, it’s believable that we’re in Egypt even if we don’t see much real evidence of it. It would have been nice to see more in the way of exploration but when a film is this short there’s only so much you can fit in. If it had been even 5 minutes longer and that time had been used to set the scene and add some more atmosphere I feel it would have greatly benefited.
I’m going to award The Mummy’s Hand, 3 Tana leaves out of 5. Not a true classic but an important film in the Mummy mythos. If you’re after a shambling slasher with the archetypal bandaged monster then this is where it began.
**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**
Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.
Let’s talk Tana leaves. They are integral to the plot, being the key ingredient of the elixir which revives Kharis, but…why? They just seem to add extra complexity which never pays off. We’re told that 3 keeps him alive, 9 will revive him and allow him to move about, but more than 9 and he’ll become some unstoppable monster! But no, we never get to see that happen, it’s just a tease.
The elixir also seems to work like mummy cat nip and vials of it are used to lure Kharis to his various victims, but again, why? He seems perfectly capable of following orders, it does seem that they’re his payoff for doing the priest’s bidding, but honestly for a film this short we could have done with less Tana and more tombs.
Despite what I said about the story being decent it really does derail a bit towards the end. The Priest, Andoheb, spends most of the film coming across as intelligent, if a little creepy, but then as soon as Kharis brings him Solvani’s daughter Marta, he goes full horn dog and decides he’s going to inject her and himself with the Tana leaf elixir making them both immortal. Oh, so it can do that now? Why hadn’t you done it already if this stuff is so good? It comes out of nowhere.
Speaking of Marta she’s quite a strong female character for a 1940’s movie, she only faints a couple of times, but seriously she’s shown as being the confident, sensible, intelligent person that her father is not and isn’t entirely there to get kidnapped. It’s her who figures out there must be a secret passage, and Steve doesn’t doubt her conclusion. It’s a real plus point for the film that there isn’t a bad boy / good girl dynamic between Steve and Marta which is an often used stereotype.
The final confrontation with Kharis is actually pretty fun, he’s impervious to bullets, super strong and he’s getting close to overdosing on the Tana leaf elixir (OK so maybe it does add something but it could have been handled better!) Kharis meets a fiery end at the hands of Steve and Babe with one fairly graphic, for 1940, shot of the burning Mummy on the floor.
We can’t end on that though, there’s a few light hearted jokes including a nice call back to a letter Steve received earlier in the film. There’s a lot of humour, and it’s well done, it never feels too much and rather than detracting from the horror aspects it helps to make those sections more effective, always end on a joke.
I think that wraps it up…
Summerisle 