Reviewed by JONATHAN LEWIS:         


THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY’S TOMB. Hammer Films, UK, 1964. Columbia Pictures, US, 1964. Terence Morgan, Ronald Howard, Fred Clark, Jeanne Roland,George Pastell, Jack Gwillim, John Paul, Dickie Owen. Screenwriter-director: Michael Carreras.

   Directed, written (under the credited name “Henry Younger”), and produced by Michael Carreras, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb is a Hammer film about well … you guessed it, an archaeological expedition that unearths a mummy’s tomb and becomes the object of the mummy’s revenge.

   Ronald Howard, perhaps best known for starring in the 1954 Sherlock Holmes series, portrays John Bray, a Cambridge archaeologist who seeks to unravel the mysteries of the ancient Egyptian past. After his French colleague is murdered in the desert, he and his would-be betrothed, Annette Dubois (Jeanne Roland) make their way by boat up the Nile with the intention of returning to London.

   It is on that fateful trip that they encounter Adam Beauchamp (Terence Morgan), a mysterious Englishmen who inserts himself into their lives and knows far more about ancient Egyptian history than it first appears. But who is he and what does he want with Annette? That’s the crux of the story.

   When compared with Hammer’s The Mummy (1959) that I reviewed here, this later film comes across as a rather tepid and an uninspiring attempt to capitalize upon the former’s aesthetic, narrative, and musical genius. Indeed, without Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, the movie just isn’t all that memorable in terms of its actors and their stage presence. But that doesn’t mean that one should completely write off this admittedly clunky mid-1960s horror film as purely derivative and as having no particular intrinsic value as a film onto itself.

   Although this is not a particularly well-crafted film, it’s actually significantly better than its harshest critics would suggest. True, often the art design leaves a lot to be desired and the supposedly ancient Egyptian artifacts look cheap and plastic. And yes, the story takes a well to fully coalesce into a coherent narrative. That said, however, the film does compensate for these flaws by introducing a few new elements and surprises into the mummy film corpus.

   These include a subplot with an inherent critique as to how mummies were often used in the West for cheap thrills and entertainment purposes and (Spoiler Alert) the finale in which it is revealed in which the film’s nominal villain is the mummy’s brother, who is revealed to be Beauchamp (Morgan).

    Due to a curse, he has been condemned to everlasting life as a mortal human being roaming the Earth alone for thousands of years. It’s a curious little twist, one that’s just enough to rescue The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb from the obscurity it that would have befallen it had merely been a weak reworking of the brilliant Hammer original.