Picking up right after the events of The Mummy's Tomb (1942) , The Mummy's Ghost (1944) is also set in Mapleton, Massachusetts 30 years after the events of The Mummy's Hand (1940) which makes this film set in 1970, where fashions, hair styles, cars, phones, and so on look exactly as they did in the 1940s. The college campus is free of hippies. No one says "far out."
Once again, Kharis needs a new high priest and handler, this time in the form of John Carradine whose task is to revive Kharis and to retrieve the body of Ananka from the museum in which it lays. When Ananka is found, her body disintegrates at the touch meaning that her soul has found a new body to inhabit. That body turns out to be the beautiful Ramsay Ames, who finds herself strangely drawn to Kharis, and upon each time of contact she gains a new birthmark, followed by a sexy streak of wuite hair, then a second streak of white hair, and then things get worse and Kharis and his recovered queen sink into the murk of a swamp.
Like its predecessors, this movie is about an hour long including recaps of what has gone on before, which is kind of strange since these movies play fast and loose with continuity anyway. There are also scenes of men creating a pit trap in which to capture the mummy which never comes into play. This is a much better movie than The Mummy's Tomb, though it suffers in the same regard as many of the Universal horrors in that it's leading man is a completely uninteresting character. I did spend a lot of time marveling at the dangerous feats that Chaney and his stunt double had to tackle in that costume, wondering how many times they tripped and fell while having to shuffle up and down steep inclines and ladders, often while carrying a woman in their arms.
1 comment:
As a kid I always enjoyed the Kharis movies more than the original Mummy. I wanted to see the mummy shamble about causing mayhem, and that's what they delivered!
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