Die Rache Des Pharao

Hammer had two great stars, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. When they tried to make a horror movie without them, what they got was kind of pedestrian and predictable.

I usually try to avoid "Star Quality" as a virtue of film, but Hammer proved it...

The plot is that an archaeological team uncovers the lost tomb of a dead Egyptian prince. The mummy is reanimated and begins to pick off the people who opened his tomb. (Cliche). The twist is that his brother has been cursed to live forever, and wants his brother to kill him, after he took care of those people who desecrated the tomb, of course..

(Now, you'd think that if you were tired of eternal life, you wouldn't focus on snuffing the bit players so much.)

Especially nutty is the evil brother seducing the girlfriend of the head archaeologist....Now you would think that if you are so anxious to die, you wouldn't worry about such side issues...

It's okay to watch, but not great. YOu can see why whoever owns the rights to Hammer films put this on the "collection disk" grouping.

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.

All Hammer Movies had that look. They had a way of presenting Color in a formula of their own design and it is part of their appeal to this day. In a word, it is sumptuous. Here we have the Studio's second Mummy Movie as our old friend is awakened once again to materialize the proverbial Curse.

It has a rather talky first half but the verbiage is slightly interesting and the "Mummy as Sideshow" is a new take. The second half kicks into gear and moves quite energetically, well as energetic as a Mummy can be. He seems determined to wreak the necessary havoc and does so quite brutally.

In the finale things really come together with a Plot twist and an exciting chase through the sewers. Overall, this is mid-range Hammer and that is almost always better than the Studio's contemporaries. Definitely worth a view for Hammer, Horror, and B-Movie Fans.

While definitely not as much a first-rate production as Hammer's first Mummy, Curse of the Mummy's Tomb has some great camerawork, nice supporting performances, and an intriguing mummy plot. Archaeologists financed by an American P. T. Barnum type find a lost tomb and open it despite the curse that says whosoever is present at its opening should die. Hammer production values prevail with lush costumes and sets. George Pastell(from the original) is back as yet another Egyptian naysayer out to prove that the British had no right to take and break the sacred nature of treasure and memory of forgotten kings. Michael Ripper, Jack Gwillim, and Fred Clark excel in their supporting roles, clearly out-performing the rather tiresome and boring leads of Terence Morgan, Ronald Howard, and Jeanne Roland. Clark gives an impressive performance(as well as very affable one) as the American out to turn his mummy find into carnival magic, taking the show to the "American Heartland" for a dime a peep. The story is not the fastest paced story around, but once the mummy's casket gets opened....people die. Definitely worth a look for the mummy fan.

When the discovery of a strange coffin in the Egyptian desert leads to a mysterious rash of murders as the recovery party arrives in London, it's eventually found to be the work of an ancient spell that reanimated the body of the pharaoh within leading them on a race to stop the creature's rampage.

This was a below-average and pretty forgettable entry in the series. The biggest issue with the film is the fact that there's hardly any action at all within this, focusing way too much on extraneous plot-points the keep the film running along at a dreadfully boring pace. For all the talk here of curses that are mentioned in the first half, hardly any of it makes the film go along any faster while it tends to focus on issues relating to everything but the curse. Instead, we get a rather pointless love triangle that eats up absurd amounts of time only to have it be taken away by the fact the third wheel steals her away for a secondary purpose his involvement didn't need to still get the same effect and causing her to back anyway, a massively confusing and curious chain of events that comes off very badly. Likewise, the dealings with the artifacts and their importance in solving the mystery of the brutal attacks makes the film go on for far too long and really becomes all the more flaccid by not doing anything. All in all, these tend to drag on together throughout the first half succeed so well in dragging the pace of the film out so much that it causes the actual attack to occur just shy of an hour into the movie, which is highly disconcerting. Only the back-story flashback of the origins of the mummy's identity within this section breaks up that monotony by showing the reasoning for his mummification, and after that there's a few shambling attacks spread out to really help the second half to have better pacing and more excitement. The finale chase does make for quite a fun time as the sewer battle does make up for some of the extreme boredom and the situation involving the cliché attraction does help this out by generating the kind of uplifting arc needed here. Along with the fine make-up on the creature, these good points do help out somewhat here though there's still a lot of problems within this one.

Today's Rating/PG: Violence.