Mummy's calling this summer

In 1932, a brilliant little horror film, entitled The Mummy, featured one of the most terrifying scenes in movies at that time and I must confess a scene that burned itself into my mind when I saw the film as a youth.

A young scientist is working in an ancient Egyptian crypt, the mummified body of Im-Ho-Tep behind him. Slowly, the mummy begins to come to life, moving, emerging from his tomb after thousands of years of deep sleep. The young man looks up into the face of an ancient evil. He watches as the mummy leaves the tomb and when his colleagues find him he is stark raving mad, uttering "He went for a little walk... just a little walk... he went for a little walk."

Boris Karloff was a major star by the time he was cast as Im-Ho-Tep via the performance he gave as the monster in the classic Frankenstein (1931). He would twice more portray the monster in the superb The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), arguably the greatest of the Universal horror films and The Son of Frankenstein (1939), before handing the role to other lesser actors who never quite captured the anguish and, dare I say, grace Karloff brought to the role. He spent the rest of his career forever identified with the roles he portrayed in those old horror films, despite a superb performance on Broadway as the murderous Jonathan Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace.

The Mummy (1932,****) has been re-released on DVD with the two new mummy films, The Mummy (1999,**) and The Mummy Returns (2001,*), which were hugely successful a few years ago, making a star of Canadian actor Brendan Fraser.

Obviously Karloff's film is the stronger of the three and a genuine classic of the horror film genre. Though compact at around 70 minutes, the action moves nicely and the picture is anchored by Karloff's strong work as the mummy brought to life. Of course, Universal fell prey to greed and began cranking out sequel after sequel, beginning with The Mummy's Hand (1940), followed by the increasingly inferior films, The Mummy's Tomb (1942), The Mummy's Ghost (1944), The Mummy's Curse (1944) and, finally, Abbott and Costello meet The Mummy (1955). This time of sequel mania seemed to plague the many horror films of the classic era and sadly, has spilled over into modern filmmaking.

When the decision came to remake the film in 1959 with Christopher Lee as the mummy in Hammer Films' production The Mummy (1959), the film was but a pale imitation of what Karloff had created.

The Mummy (1999), directed by Stephen Sommers, was a merging of Indiana Jones action-style moviemaking with the horror genre, as the picture opens with a prologue in which we see what became of Im-Ho-Tep, buried alive for betraying the pharaoh and falling in love with his mistress. His tomb is disturbed and the monster awakened and our hero, portrayed with a cocked eyebrow by Fraser, gives chase. The film is great fun, but as deep as the paper on which it was written. The CGI effects are OK, though they look like early examples of a new technology. The film made money and thus, there was, guess what... a sequel.

The Mummy Returns (2001) was really little more than a continuation of the first film. Our hero is now married to his lady love of the first film, they have a son and the boy's daffy uncle dons the garb of the legendary Scorpion King and awakens a long dormant curse. 'Nuff said. Bigger is not always better and the CGI effects here, though two years later, are certainly not an improvement.

Each of the new DVD's contains a bounty of extras, including documentaries about the making of the films. However the best is on the Karloff platter -- a wonderful doc on the great make-up artist Jack Pierce who created some of the greatest creatures in movie history.

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John Foote, director of the Toronto Film School, is a nationally known film historian/critic and a Port Perry resident. Get more reviews at www.footeonfilm.com. Contact him at jfoote@IAOD.com