The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964)

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

If you go into the Hammer movie "The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb" thinking it will deliver like the 1959 Hammer movie "The Mummy" did five years earlier, most likely you'll be very disappointed. But even if you haven't seen the earlier movie, you'll probably be somewhat let down. It isn't an awful movie - the production values are solid (except for some phony looking outdoor sequences obviously shot inside of a studio), and it's never boring. And I could live with the fact that the movie is missing a magnetic actor like Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee in a pivotal role. But when it comes to delivering the goods, the movie disappoints. Believe it or not, it takes almost two-thirds of the movie before the mummy starts on its rampage. These scenes with the mummy are, I admit, kind of fun. But they are brief and not large in number. Most of the movie is talk, talk, and more talk. More action and horror, and a lot less blabbering as well, would have helped things considerably. At least the movie is short (80 minutes), though even then the padding of the somewhat thin story is obvious many times.

It's hard to think of another actress's role that is so thankless and unsympathetic as the one assigned here to Jeanne Roland. She comes across as an uncaring wanton; her father dies, and she's next seen, without a care in the world, carousing on a ship with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend is knocked out on the ship, and, minutes later, she's drinking and flirting with a stranger instead of being at her friend's bedside. The boyfriend is then knocked unconscious again, and, again, she's drinking and canoodling callously with this stranger as though oblivious to all except her voracious libido. She comes across as a lascivious nymph, and I was left hoping the Mummy would do her in to save the boyfriend the trouble! It all made a mediocre film even more ludicrous!

Hammer Films which took over the famous Universal horror icons did a mummy's tale with The Curse Of The Mummy's Tomb. A little bit of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray story was weaved into the plot of this movie.Set at the turn of the last century, three archaeologists unearth the tomb of a crown prince of Egypt who legend has it was slain by his brother a few thousand years BC. But someone with reasons of his own to finance the expedition has used some ancient spells to revive the dead and the prince is out settling a few scores against those who've violated his sleep.Terrance Morgan stars in this film and he's the fellow with the Dorian Gray situation. He's got an agenda himself working here at it involves putting an end to his Dorian Gray like existence and being reunited in eternity with his true love. In that sense a leaf is borrowed from the classic original Mummy film that starred Boris Karloff.Which happens to be my favorite horror film of all time so every other mummy film just pales in comparison. Still The Curse Of The Mummy's Tomb has enough on its own merits to rate some comparison and Terrence Morgan who is best remembered on the big screen for playing Laertes to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet does a fine job here as a most tortured soul.

The key problem with this handsomely mounted, but extremely pedestrian picture is that it quite simply takes too long to get going and start cooking the way that it should from the get go. Writer/director Michael Carreras alas allows the opening half to plod by at a leisurely clip and crucially fails to build any tension or momentum that would sped things along better. It doesn't help that the story is totally routine: Once again a lethal shambling mummy springs to angry life in order to avenge itself on several people who are foolish enough to desecrate its tomb. Fortunately, the movie finally begins humming and delivers a few effectively rousing mounts after the mummy awakens. Dickie Owen as the mummy makes for an impressively fierce and fearsome monster. The violence is shockingly brutal and gruesome stuff. Plus there's a nice unexpected plot twist involving one of the central characters. The game cast do their best with the mediocre material, with especially stand-out contributions by Terence Morgan as the charming Adam Beauchamp, Ronald Howard as the huffy John Bray, Fred Clark as the blithely crass P.T. Barnumesque American showman Alexander King, Jeanne Roland as the fetching, sensitive Annette Dubois, George Pastell as the helpful Hashmi Bey, and Jack Gwillim as the hearty, morally upright Sir Giles Dalrymple. Both Otto Heller's sumptuous widescreen cinematography and Carlo Martelli's robust, stirring score are up to par. But overall this film is way too bland and meandering to be anything more than a merely watchable and acceptable time-waster.