Il mistero della mummia

All four Mummy films by Hammer I like. Curse with atmospheric scenes does give a quality to it. You have fog bound London to add atmosphere. Sets on film re Egyptian biz are quite good.Story so-so various characters who crop up. Then we have the Mummy itself which looks quite impressive, with scenes with Mummy in like in fog top of steps near embankment etc, scene in study where curtains are concealing it. Another scene in house where Mummy ascending stairs, menacing and quite gripping. Odd comical relief in film re certain characters. Overall film has some merit to it!

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.

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.

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.

Curse of the mummy's tomb certainly is not a best effort from Hammer studios, as many of their true classics outshine it without any serious effort. However, it is not as much a disaster as many comments here in IMDb suggest. The movie doesn't have any Hammer's big stars in the cast, the story doesn't bring anything new into the mummy myth, and at few times the going gets unintentionally hilarious in the film. But on the other hand, the characters are acted quite solidly, even if the performances don't truly shine. Comical reliefs are mostly done with certain style, especially by Fred Clark as a P.T. Barnum replica, and the plot has few interesting twists. We even have here few scenes of surprisingly graphic of it's time, if a bit unrealistic screen violence, if that's your cup of tea. Slow pace and low action rate of the film works more for than against the movie, at least in my books, and the whole package is short enough, so the story can carry it all through till the end.

All in all, if you're a fan of old horror films, give it a go, whether you're a fan of Hammer studios works or not. At least this one certainly beats the stuffing out of it's follow-up, Mummy's shroud, which in my opinion truly deserves any public stoning it gets.

This is my truth - what is yours?