The Mummy’s Curse (1944) April 27th, 2020

A couple of years ago my wife and I began watching the Universal Monsters series because we realized we’d never seen any of them. Not wanting to miss out on any hidden gems, we committed to watching them all. Luckily they start out great. Dracula, Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein are amazing, as is the Spanish language version of Dracula shot at the exact same time with the exact same sets as the English version but with different actors, director and crews. Our home video release came with both versions which I highly recommend. Turns out most of them suck, and not just the movies with vampires (every time you hear a dad joke, a “back” gets “in my day…”). James Whale get’s superbly weird in The Bride of Frankenstein but it takes a lot of mental gymnastics to justify recommending any of them. If you’re a completist, a monster fanboy or you’re passionate for film history. That’s the movie recommendation version of a double-double.

If I had my way, the greatest minds of our time would agree to seal every copy of the Mummy movies away, buried in a desert tomb. Unfortunately as the coming centuries pass, tales of the lost films grow. What terrible wonders do they hold? What is the secret of the Mummy’s tomb? What awful wastes of time lay buried within? The abysmal discs remain hidden for thousands of years before they’re unearthed by a team of enterprising archeologists. Surprisingly, the tomb comes equipped with an antiquated but fully powered and functional video playback system which allows the explorers to be the first humans in a thousand years to experience each movie in The Mummy series. This is a fool’s trap, only the most hubristic, vain and stupid people would sit in this forsaken chamber and subject themselves to these long lost horrors. 6 hours later they’re all dead, some died from what appears to be self inflicted blunt force trauma to the skull, the others were found with their brains leaking from their eyes, ears and noses. Days later, a band of locals stumble upon the scene. They immediately take to resealing the cursed place for they, unlike the poor souls now locked inside, heeded the warning scrolled over the tomb’s entrance. “Yo, these movies suck. Do not watch them.”

If it isn’t clear yet, the main problem I have with the movies in this series is they’re repetitive and boring. It’s always the same plot, a member of some weird ancient Egyptian cult/religion and a servant revive the Mummy using nine forbidden tana leaves to make a… tea I guess? He gets rowdy and probably kills some people but it doesn’t work out for him before everything wraps up. That’s the plot of every Mummy movie. They’re exactly that similar. Don’t waste your time or money on this deadbeat series.

This obviously doesn’t apply to the 1999 Brendan Fraser classic, no that version of The Mummy rules.

I wish I had more to say but the most important thing to know about this movie is it should be avoided. It isn’t even bad in a fun way, this is the kind of movie Ed Wood would’ve made if he had enough money to erase all the charm of his shoestring ingenuity. Good-bad movies can be charming and sometimes even incredible. The Room‘s unique je ne sais quoi of the terrible try hard movie that couldn’t but did, might’ve propelled it past Plan 9 From Outer Space as the go-to-shitty-movie reference. These two films have an infectious charm that makes them quotable and terribly reverential. Do not get it twisted, The Mummy’s Curse doesn’t have any of those qualities. Don’t try to be a hero, don’t go looking for your own fame and fortune as one of the few who willingly suffered through this movie looking for some undiscovered treasure. It isn’t there. Believe me, I looked.