Review(s): DVD The Mummy - The Legacy Collection (The Mummy/Mummy's Hand/Mummy's Tomb/Mummy's Ghost/Mummy's Curse)
They Forgot My Mummy!
Eagarly with anticipation I waited for Halloween night to watch "The Mummy"! To my horror, I must have purchased the one defective copy of the Legacy Collection The Mummy, for it was not on disc one or disc two. It's just non-existant!
After spending $23 for this DVD, I'm sorely disappointed with the set.
Exceptional Classic Horror Tale
I remember when I was younger I would love to watch some of the old black and white classics because they had a certain creepiness to me that some of the horror movies of the 80s lacked. While watching this movie today isn't quite as frightening as watching it as a child, "The Mummy" still has plenty suspense and eeriness to it. Universal Studios made a lot of these types of classic in the 30s and 40s and they were all originals for how they portrayed monsters and creatures from beyond (Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde come to mind).
This story begins with two archeologists digging around for valuable artifacts and scrolls. When one of them comes upon a tomb with a mummy in it, he becomes intrigued and fascinated, despite protests from a man who reads an inscription on the casket that is nearby "Death, eternal punishment for anyone who opens this casket." After opening it, the curse is renewed, and the Mummy (played by creature sensation Boris Karloff) comes to life.
One of the best moments in the movie to me is the scene when the man opens the casket and the camera pans back and forth from the man reading the contents while sitting at the chair to the slowly reviving creature awakening. It is more impressive that during this scene there is no sound, as to give it a suspenseful and sinister effect upon the viewers.
After this opening scene, we fast forward 10 years later, and understand that Imhotep (the mummy, resurrected) has plans for trying to lure Helen (who is a reincarnated ancient princess) into eternity with him. However, Sir Joseph Whemple, the one who survived the terrible event 10 years prior, his son, and Dr. Muller all piece together little by little the past of not only the curse, but the events that let to it. Helen, who is played perfectly as a "damsel in distress" by Zita Johann, wavers between the hypnotic powers and plans of Imhotep and the naïve but charming Frank Whemple, who distrusts all notions of curses until the climatic scene.
Another aspect of this film that was refreshing is making Karloff's role multi-dimensional and dynamic. Although a villain and antagonist, he does (as others have noted) come across as a semi-sympathetic character whose motives are originally designed for love. As the movie progresses, he becomes too obsessed with his goals, and consequently does not stop at anything to attain his goal of capturing the princess for the afterlife.
The other movies are ones in the same Mummy series, but many fair to come close to the quality of this one. Still, it is a great deal, and The Mummy alone makes it worth the DVD.
"There's something happening that we're just powerless to stop."
This warning from The Mummy's Hand (1940) doesn't just refer to the cycle of low-budget movies by Universal during World War II. There was something else 1940s American movie audiences might have wished they could slow down, if not stop, and that was America's new (self-appointed) responsibility for running the world.
All four of these movies were sequels to The Mummy (1932) starring Boris Karloff and the compelling Hungarian actress Zita Johann (the best actor in any of the Universal mummy movies). But the sequels tell a separate story from the Karloff movie. It's the story of three-thousand-year-old Kharis and his love for the Egyptian princess Ananka, which led Kharis from the ancient and mysterious Near East to the new center of world power, the United States.
Kharis is kept alive by the extinct "tana leaves" administered by an ancient priesthood. (The medallion-wearing priests are called priests of Amon-Ra until the last two movies, when John Carradine calls himself a "priest of Arkham." (This might make The Mummy's Ghost the first movie with a reference to H.P. Lovecraft - - a cliché homage now, like "Arkham Asylum" in the Batman movies. Arkham, Mass., is the fictional town where scholars from "Miskatonic University" study the Old Gods of the Cthulhu mythos. You sometimes see Miskatonic U sweatshirts in low-budget horror movies, too.)
In The Mummy's Hand a virile American hero and his giggly male sidekick named "Babe" (who likes to play with a "hootchie-kootchie" doll he bought from an poor Arab trader in Cairo) find the tombs of Kharis and Ananka, save the girl the hero has fallen in love with, and seal up the mummies until the next movie.
In The Mummy's Tomb the virile American hero from the last movie is an old man living in Middleton, U.S.A. The ingenue has given him a son (now a doctor) and conveniently died to free up the movie for that son's love interest. This movie came out in 1942 and the war is part of it. The doctor is waiting for his army commission to come through. A reporter who comes to Middleton to cover the "fiend murders" that follow the arrival of the mummy Kharis says, "I had a choice of covering the Russian front or this."
A priest of Amon-Ra brings Kharis's mummy to Middleton, where Ananka now rests in the local museum. This evil priest looks distinctly Japanese to me, though the actor apparently wasn't. But the character must have made 1942 audiences think of their present enemy. Sending Kharis on a mission of murder, the priest says, "While the moon is still high in the sky death goes with you." Is the moon a stand-in for the Rising Sun? Is Kharis a kamikaze?
One of the plot twists in all the mummy movies is the "temptation" of the priests. This temptation is usually lust for a white (or almost white) woman whose body has been infused with the spirit of Ananka.
The doctor is engaged to get married before he ships out, and his fiancee tries on her mother's wedding dress, but the foreign priest has other ideas. When the priest tells Kharis of his plan to possess the white woman even Kharis recoils at the horror of miscegenation (the only real acting anyone is able to do in the mummy wrappings).
As in most Universal horror pics, an army of villagers with torches appear and track down the priest. The sheriff shoots him without warning and then grins. One less . . . Egyptian. The twentieth-century posse chases Kharis and the girl to the doctor's family home. (It seems like Kharis is returning her to where she belongs, the doctor's bed.)
The doctor burns down his own home to incinerate Kharis. Death by flame was a common image of the war in the Pacific. Kamikaze pilots smashed into battleships. U.S. Marines used flame-throwers against enemy troops entrenched on islands. Tokyo and other cities were firebombed (though the British and Americans did that in Europe, too). All this was before the atomic bomb was used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When The Mummy's Ghost came out (1944) the country and the movies were getting ready for the postwar period. By 1944 the Soviets had turned the Germans back at Stalingrad, Americans knew D-Day was coming soon, and the Big Three were meeting to divvy up the world. The war was as good as over, except for those who hadn't been killed in it yet.
Ghost opens in a college classroom in Middleton, filled with young men and women. By having the young men in class instead of in uniform, the movie was telling audiences it was okay to get ready for normal life again. But these young people don't know how corrupt the touch of the ancient world could be. The spirits of Kharis and Ananka were still a threat to American optimism and purity.
Here the new postwar American hero is in love with Amina, who doesn't even try to pass as white. "You're Egyptian. What's wrong with Egypt? It's as modern and up to date as any other country."
The "shadow" of Kharis that Amina feels pass over her in the night is the pull of the old world she can't resist. Describing her new acquaintance (the latest priest of Arkham to serve Kharis), Amina tells her boyfriend, "He kept talking about tana leaves and moonlight."
But late in the movie we find out something that may explain the hero's doomed love for the half-Egyptian Amina. Maybe he's not so pure himself. He wants to take Amina "to New York, to my people." "Your people?" Amina asks. "Maybe they won't want me."
"Your people" may just mean "your family," but it might be code for Jews, too. (And doesn't this young man look slightly "dark"? Could this New York boy bring home a girl less "suitable" than a part-Arab?) As Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) says in Annie Hall, the rest of the country thinks of New York as a liberal Jewish homosexual conspiracy. "Even I do sometimes." And Middleton is about as Gentile as the town Beaver Cleaver grew up in.
As usual, when Amina puts on her sheer nightgown, what priest of Arkham could resist temptation? But this mummy movie ends differently.
Kharis takes Amina (now Ananka incarnate, whose skin ages and crumbles at the mummy's touch) into a swamp. But the villagers won't let the hero chase his love into the swamp and save her from Kharis. "It's certain death." Amina/Ananka is where she belongs. ("We belong dead," as Frankenstein's monster said to his bride. You can't be part one thing and part another and live.)
This postwar hero is not like the archeologists and scientists who came before him. He's too accepting of the strange. He doesn't realize that his Amina can't be saved. She is too tainted by her foreignness. And her American hero himself may not be pure enough.
In The Mummy's Curse Kharis and Ananka rise from the swamp to find an America busy with government-sponsored technical projects, turning itself into a modern superpower.
A white manager sent to the swamps by the federal government argues with superstitious Cajuns who work for him. They don't want the swamp drained because they're afraid of stories of "the loup-garou." (A nice touch since this mummy is played by Lon Chaney, Jr., the best werewolf actor ever, but his sad face and voice go to waste in these movies. Even the mummy makeup is nothing special.)
"Can't you people get it through your head that the government is draining that swamp for your own good?" (Apparently Middleton is near the Louisiana bayou country.) The manager relies on his foreman "Cajun Joe," since he "knows how to handle these people."
A scientist comes to the swamp with an Egyptian colleague (who doesn't shake hands - - a tip-off ever since Boris Karloff first refused to shake hands in The Mummy) but the manager doesn't like "college professors getting in my way."
Pointy-headed professors aren't the only stereotypes. There's "Goobie," the only black in this part of the south (the rest of the locals speak what sound like metropolitan, not Cajun, French). Goobie's favorite line is, "The devil's on the loose and he dancin' with the mummy!" (The filmmakers liked it so much they had him repeat it.)
Ananka rises from the bayou and turns into a beautiful young woman with a Bettie Page hairdo (not the Amina who sank into the swamp at the end of the last movie). Ananka now possesses her completely.
You guessed it, the professor's Egyptian colleague is really a priest of Arkham, and he has a servitor who's passing as one of the locals. And in this movie, it isn't the priest who's tempted by the white or near-white woman, it's the acolyte. When the priest finds him with his hands on Kharis's princess Ananka, the priest puts the "curse of Amon-Ra" on him.
Michael is the self-appointed caretaker of the abandoned (presumably Christian) monastery where the Egyptian priests hide Kharis between murders. When he discovers the foreign blasphemy, Michael can save neither himself nor Ananka, who tragically can't really become American even though she's worked with the professor and his purebred American girlfriend and would like to be just like them.
The Egyptian priest can't save Kharis and his princess, and neither can the Christian monk. It's the modern scientist and government technocrat who finally bring order.
Unlike most of the other mummy films, this one doesn't end in fire, but in a more biblical way - - Kharis brings down the walls of the monastery on himself and the Egyptians like Samson.
Ananka returns to her state of decay, waiting for Hammer Films to revive her in twenty years or so.
Related DVD's The Mummy - The Legacy Collection (The Mummy/Mummy's Hand/Mummy's Tomb/Mummy's Ghost/Mummy's Curse)
For being a film from 1933, The Invisible Man is a very good film. This DVD collection contains four other movies and a documentary.
The Invisible Man itself is not quite as good as its successors, however, it is well written and at times surprisingly original. The drawbacks are the Innkeeper's wife, who was (according to the documentary) hired for the entire reason I did not like her: she overreacts to everything. She's superstitious, overly suspicious of anyone, and screams an annoying scream that drives even the other prople in the inn batty. There is some mild humor and a bit of drama in The Invisible Man and Claude Rains does a passable job, with that voice that just creeps under your skin...
As one of the six "Legacy" collections featuring the popular Universal monsters, the Creature set has some distinctly unique features. In one way, it's the sparsest collection, with only three movies, but it also is the only one with commentaries on all the films. Perhaps more importantly is the nature of the Creature himself. While the other monsters are either purely supernatural (Dracula, the Wolf Man), purely man-made (Frankenstein's monster, the Invisible Man) or a combination of the two (the Mummy), only the Creature is a natural creature.
What also stands out in the Creature movies is that humanity in general comes off as the bad guys and the Creature is the most sympathetic figure. Acting in a generally defensive manner, the Creature is subjected to greater and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Richard Carlson - Julie Adams Director(s): Jack Arnold DVD Release Date: Released the 19 October 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The story is a familiar one: Larry, the son of esteemed Sir John (Rains) returns home to Wales after many years in America, is bitten by a werewolf (well played by Bela Lugosi), and becomes a werewolf himself. What's extraordinary is the fact that the film can be so effective today.
The biggest reason for this is the acting. Some classic films, pre-Actor's Studio, look pretty pathetic when it comes to realistic characterization. Not so THE WOLF MAN. Curt Siodmak's excellent screenplay (likened to a Greek Tragedy) provides... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Claude Rains - Warren William Director(s): George Waggner DVD Release Date: Released the 27 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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"It's alive! Alive!" shouts Colin Clive's triumphant Dr. Frankenstein as electricity buzzes over the hulking body of a revived corpse. "In the name of God now I know what it's like to be God!" For years unheard, this line has been restored, along with the legendary scene of the childlike monster tossing a little girl into a lake, in James Whale's Frankenstein, one of the most famous and influential horror movies ever made. Coming off the tremendous success of Dracula, Universal assigned sophomore director Whale to helm an adaptation of Mary Shelley's famous novel with Bela Lugosi as the monster. When Lugosi declined the role, Whale cast the largely unknown character actor Boris Karloff and together with makeup designer Jack Pierce they created the most memorable monster in... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Colin Clive - Mae Clarke - Boris Karloff Director(s): James Whale DVD Release Date: Released the 27 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Why would Universal previously distribute a superior DVD and then repackage the same film but decrease the quality???
The Legacy Collection of the original Dracula movie from 1930 is a lesser quality DVD than it's predecessor from the Classic Monsters Collection set. The image quality is blurry and fuzzy - I'll take film grain and hairs over blurred out images anyday. The audio is also muted and soft as compared to the earlier released DVD.
I've compared both DVDs side by side, and the previous "Classic Monsters Collection" DVD won out in DVD quality.
My suggestion to all customers is to avoid these lesser quality (but newer) releases of Dracula and buy the earlier release instead. More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Bela Lugosi - Helen Chandler - David Manners Director(s): Tod Browning DVD Release Date: Released the 27 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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