The Complete Saga of Kharis the Mummy

While the 1932 film "The Mummy remains the best mummy picture ever made, it was the Universal low-budget quickies of the 1940s that actually solidified the idea of the shambling, bandage-wrapped mummy that dominates pop culture and Halloween spook houses today. This post covers those four genere-shaping films.

The Mummy's Hand (1940)
Starring: Dick Foran, Wallace Ford, Peggy Moran, George Zucco, and Tim Tyler
Director: Christy Cabanne
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

A pair of hard-luck Egyptologists (Foran and Ford) discover the location of the long lost tomb of Princess Ananka. Unfortunately for them, an evil cult leader (Zucco) controls the immortal, tomb-guarding, tanna leaf-tea slurping mummy Kharis, and he's hot afraid to use him to keep the secret of the tomb.


More of an adventure flick with a heavy dose of lowbrow comedy than a horror film, "The Mummy's Hand" isn't even a proper sequel to the classy 1932 "The Mummy."

This movie (and the three sequels that follow) are completely unrelated to the original film, despite the copious use of stock footage from it. The most obvious differences are that the mummy here is named Kharis, as opposed to Imhotep, and has a different backstory. Then, there's the fact he's a mindless creature who goes around strangling people at the bidding of a pagan priest where Imhotep was very much his own man and did his killing with dark magics without ever laying a hand on his victims.

If one recognizes that this film shares nothing in common with the Boris Karloff film (except that they were both released by the same studio), "The Mummy's Hand" is a rather nice bit of fluff. It's also the first film to feature the real Universal Studios mummy, as Imhotep was an intelligent, scheming, and more-or-less natural looking man, not a mute, mind-addled, bandaged-wrapped, cripple like Kharis.


The Mummy's Tomb (1942)
Starring: Wallace Ford, Turhan Bey, John Hubbard, George Zucco, Dick Foran, Isobel Evans, and Lon Chaney Jr.
Director: Harold Young
Rating: Three of Ten Stars

Thirty years after the events of "The Mummy's Hand, the High Priest of Karnak from the last film (Zucco), who, despite being shot four times and pointblank range and tumbling down a very long flight of stairs, survived to be an old man. He passes the mantle onto a younger man (Bey) and dispatches him to America with Kharis the Mummy (Chaney), who survived getting burned to a crisp at the end of the last movie, to slay those who dared loot the tomb of Princess Anankha. (Better late than never, eh?)


Take the plot of "The Mummy's Hand" (complete with a villain who has the exact same foibles as the one from the first movie), remove any sense of humor and adventure, toss in about ten minutes of recap to pad it up to about 70 minutes in length, add a climax complete with torch-weilding villagers and a mummy who is just too damn dumb to continue his undead existence, and you've got "The Mummy's Tomb."

Made with no concern for consistency (Ford's character changes names from Jenson to Hanson, the fashions worn in "The Mummy's Hand" implied it took place in the late 30s, or even in the year it was filmed, and yet "thirty years later" is clearly during World War II... and let's not even talk about how the mummy and Zucco's character survived) or originality (why write a whole new script when we can just have the bad guys do the exact same things they did last movie?), this film made with less care than the majority of B-movies.

Turhan Bey and Wallace Ford have a couple of good moments in this film, but they are surrounded by canned hash and complete junk.


The Mummy's Ghost (1944)
Starring: John Carradine, Ramsay Ames, Robert Lowery, George Zucco, and Lon Chaney Jr
Director: Reginald Le Borg
Rating: Three of Ten Stars

Modern day priests of ancient Egyptian gods (Zucco and Carradine) undertake a mission to retrieve the cursed mummy of Princess Ananka from the American museum where she's been kept for the past 30 years. Unfortunately, they discover that the archeologists who stole her away from Egypt broke the spell that kept her soul trapped in the mummy and that she has been reincarnated in America as the beautiful Amina (Ames).


"The Mummy's Ghost" starts out strong. In fact, it starts so strong that, despite the fact that the priests who must be laughing stock of evil cult set were back with pretty much the exact same scheme for the third time (go to America and send Kharis the Mummy stumbling around to do stuff, that it looked like the filmmakers may have found their way back to the qualities that made "The Mummy" such a cool picture.

Despite a really obnoxious love interest for Amina (played with nails-on-a-chalkboard-level of obnoxiousness by Robert Lowery) and a complete resurrection of Kharis (boiling tannith leaves now apparently reconstitutes AND summons a mummy that was burned to ashes in a house-fire during "The Mummy's Tomb"), and a number of glaring continuity errors with the preceding films (the cult devoted to Ananka and Kharis has changed their name... perhaps because they HAD become the laughing stock among the other evil cults), the film is actually pretty good for about half its running time. The plight of and growing threat toward Amina lays a great foundation.

And then it takes a sharp nosedive into crappiness where it keeps burrowing downward in search of the bottom.

The cool idea that the film started with (Ananka's cursed soul has escaped into the body of a living person... and that person must now be destroyed to maintain the curse of the gods) withers away with yet another replay of the evil priest deciding he wants to do the horizontal mambo for all enternity with the lovely female lead. The idea is further demolished by a nonsensical ending where the curses of Egypt's ancient gods lash out in the modern world, at a very badly chosen target. I can't go into details without spoiling that ending, but it left such a bad taste in my mouth, and it's such a complete destruction of the cool set-up that started the film, that the final minute costs "The Mummy's Ghost" a full Star all by itself.



The Mummy's Curse (1944)
Starring: Peter Coe, Lon Chaney Jr, Kay Harding, Dennis Moore, Virginia Christine, and Kurt Katch
Director: Leslie Goodwins
Rating: Three of Ten Stars

A construction project in Louisiana's bayou uncovers not only the mummy Kharis (Chaney), but also the cursed princess Ananka (Christine). Pagan priests from Egypt arrive to take control of both. Mummy-induced violence and mayhem in Cajun Country follow.

What happens when you make a direct sequel where no one involved cares one whit about keeping continuity with previous films? You get "The Mummy's Curse"!

For the previous entries in this series, Kharis was shambling around a New England college town, yet he's dug up in Louisiana. (He DID sink into a swamp at the end of "The Mummy's Ghost", but that swamp was hundreds of miles north of where he's found in this film.)

He also supposedly has been in the swamp for 25 years. For those keeping score, that would make this a futuristic sci-fi film with a setting of 1967, because the two previous films took place in 1942. (And that's being generous. I'm assuming "The Mummy's Hand" took place in 1912, despite the fact that all clothing and other signifiers imply late 30s early 40s.) Yet, there's nothing in the film to indicate that the filmmakers intended to make a sci-fi movie.

And then there's Ananka. Why is she back, given her fate in "The Mummy's Ghost"? There's absolutely no logical reason for it. Her resurrection scene is very creepy, as is the whole "solar battery" aspect of the character here, but it is completely inconsistent with anything that's gone before. And she's being played by a different actress--but I suppose 25 years buried in a swamp will change anyone.

There's little doubt that if anyone even bothered to glance at previous films for the series, no one cared.

Some things the film does right: It doesn't have the Egyptian priests replay exactly the same stuff they've done in previous films for the fourth time (although they are still utter idiots about how they execute their mission), it manages for the first time to actually bring some real horror to the table--Kharis manages to be scary in this film, and I've already mentioned Ananka's creep-factor--and they bring back the "mummy shuffling" music from "The Mummy's Ghost" which is actually a pretty good little theme. But the utter disregard for everything that's happened in other installments of the series overwhelm and cancel out the good parts.

"The Mummy's Curse" should not have been slapped into the "Kharis" series. If it had been made as a stand-alone horror film, it could have been a Six-Star movie. As it is, this just comes across as a shoddy bit of movie making where I can only assume that anything decent is more by accident than design.

Gangsters. Real Gangsters.

It's June Collyer vs. a love-crazed superhero!

If it's not obvious from this blog, I love old movies and I love old comic books. I also love writing silly supplements for NUELOW's "ROLF!: The Rollplaying Game of Big Dumb Fighters".

Those three favorite things collide in "Black Kitten vs. June Collyer", a ROLF! Valentine's Day Special where actress June Collyer (star of some 30 films between the years of 1927 and 1936, including "Hangman's House" (1928), "The Drums of Jeopardy" (1931), and "A Face in the Fog" (1936)) becomes the object of a superhero's jealous rage when Black Kitten becomes convinced that June Collyer is standing between her and the object of her love, Black Cobra.

June Collyer

"Black Kitten vs. June Collyer" was written by Steve Miller and L.L. Hundal and features artwork by Darrel Miller. It has game stats for obscure Golden Age comic book heroes Black Cobra and Black Kitten, actress June Collyer, and Communist Zombies; rules that expand upon the material presented in the core ROLF! game; and three battle scenarios.

Click here to get a copy of the NUELOW Games Valentine's Day special for just $0.50! It will be just like spending the holiday with June Collyer, superheroes, and me, your kind host. (And it will also let you understand why I never get any second dates.)

If you've never played ROLF! before, you can use this to get a copy for $1, thanks to a special link for a special discount available only for Shades of Gray readers.

More Paul Gulacy: Promo art for 'Sabre'

It's Black History Month, so I am throwing out a couple questions for the assemblage: Was the Don McGregor scripted and Paul Gulacy/Billy Graham illustrated series "Sabre" the first American sci-fi comic book to feature a Black headliner?

And while it wasn't the first series to feature an inter-racial relationship--I believe that honor goes to Marvel's "Iron Fist"--was the first to have an inter-racial couple with children?

Picture Perfect Wednesday with Paul Gulacy

Although I think the poor ladies might disagree about this being a perfect day....

Cover pic for the next NUELOW Games release

"ROLF!: The Grim Reaper vs. the Fertility Goddess" will be released late today or early tomorrow via my online outlet at RPGNow.com, but in the meantime, here is the cover illo.

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (Little-Brown 2007)
Writing and Art: Hergé
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Tintin, a young Belgian reporter, travels to the Soviet Union during the late 1920s to report on the socialist government of Joseph Stalin. He uncovers vast corruption in the "workers' paradise" and becomes marked for death by Stalin's secret police, prompting a string of adventures as he escapes back to Belgium.

"Tintin in the Land of the Soviets" was the first tale of the intrepid "boy reporter" and his dog Snowy that Herge wrote and drew. It is different in tone and style than all works that followed, and it is clearly the product of an artist still mastering his craft, not to mention finding the proper tone for the series that became his most celebrated.

Originally serialized in magazine from in 1929 and 1930, and published in book form shortly after completing its magazine run, Herge later a low opinion of this work. It's the only one of the 23 completed Tintin adventures that Hergé did not subsequently redraw in a color edition and/or update with more modern panels and references as the years went by. In fact, for decades, Herge blocked any efforts to republish "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets," and it wasn't until 1989 that he allowed an English translation of the book.

The style of story-telling "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets" is very different than the later stories that almost all saw some degree of revision by Herge over the years. It's closest in tone to "Tintin in the Congo" and "Tintin in America," which, if you read those three early works back-to-back, you can see the evolution of Tintin, even though Herge revised the two latter ones for later editions.

And, the art here is also far cruder than anything else I've ever read by Herge--it is barely recognizable, in fact. That said, I've never seen the original "Tintin in the Congo" nor "Tintin in America", but only the revised color versions. (And it's been 35 or so years since I read "Tintin in the Congo... and I'm not likely to get my hands on a copy again any time soon, as the hystrionics of the politically correct crowd and over-sensitive cry-babies successfully blocked its paperback re-issue back in 2008.)

The overall style is also more in line with newspaper comic strips of the 1920s and 1930s rather than the action-adventure of later Tintin stories. While there are some serious matters addressed--such as the portrayal of the Soviet government as murderous, corrupt, and predatory toward the people they were supposedly protecting and serving, portrayals which history has shown to be mild when compared to reality--the over-the-top cartoon action is what is most memorable about the book... and which is not found on this level in later works. Scenes where Tintin builds a plane over night or is frozen solid after wet from a river into the cold Russian night are almost without equal in Hergé later Tintin efforts, with the possible exception of the major city being built overnight or some of Tintin's interactions with Indians in "Tintin in America."

Still... if you like Tintin, you're bound to like this book. I don't think Hergé ever told a bad Tintin story.