BIGGER & BLACKER

In the wide world of sequels that certainly don't have any actual reason to exist, one could do a lot worse, conceptually speaking, than The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death - though that title! There's absolutely nothing that mouthful achieves that wouldn't be more accurately and clearly covered by just plain The Woman in Black 2. But anyway, the sequel to the 2012 ghost story The Woman in Black has the good sense to leave that film's cast entirely alone, and with a perfectly fine Edwardian-era haunted house that nobody in the surrounding village wants to go near, it was as easy as pie to skip forward a few decades to find it still squatting there, grim and rotting, for a pair of London schoolteachers and band of refugee children to shelter there during the Blitz. This is, I am inclined to think, the most characteristically Hammer-esque touch in this latest production by the resurgent Hammer Films. It is also the only halfway decent idea to be found anywhere within Jon Croker's script, so there's that.

The glow of that one right choice does linger for a bit, though, and the opening sequence, in 1941 London, is a pretty terrific re-creation of the period in all its tightly-circumscribed panic, for a shlocky horror movie. Hell, given the movie this is, and given the people making up its target audience, I'm downright impressed by how unapologetically it throws us into the setting without bothering to explain the context or history. All we get are Eve Parkins (Phoebe Fox), a young woman who teaches under the command of the strict headmistress Jean Hogg (Helen McCrory), and the two of them are in a hurry to get their seven charges off to the rural village of Crythin Gifford. Make that eight charges, since in the previous night's bombing, little Edward (Oaklee Pendergast) lost both of his parents, and is now joining Hogg's band, complete with a shellacked, post-traumatic lack of expression and refusal to speak. This is about the point where the movie uses up all its sense of place and war-era imagery, and no longer can pretend that it's any good in any way.

After arriving by train to Crythin Gifford late at night, the grumbling local do-gooder Dr. Rhodes (Adrian Rawlins, star of the 1989 Woman in Black telefilm) roughly informs the women that the only available lodging is the sprawling mansion on the outskirts of town, Eel Marsh House. Though to be honest, I'm not sure if it's named such. One thing that Angels of Death cannot be accused of is too much exposition on behalf of the viewers who might not have bothered with the first movie, and that goes from setting the stage - the important fact that Eel Marsh House is on the far side of a causeway that disappears during high tide is used during a tension-raising scene without have actually been established - all the way to the meat of its story, which uses the mythology of the titular woman (Leanne Best) that was explained the first time without really bothering to go over it all again, so a great deal of what happens is inexplicable far beyond the normal kind of cryptic events to be found in horror movies. And I cannot help but appreciate that economy of storytelling; but if a film is going to depend so completely on the viewer's knowledge of the first movie in order to make sense as a narrative object, it feels like a cheat to then have the content of the sequel be a re-hash of all the same setpieces from the last time around, in a slightly different order.

In fact, just about the only thing that The Woman in Black did that Angel of Death fails to repeat was to include a single protracted haunting sequence uninterrupted by plot or even dialogue. That was basically the only thing that hauled the first movie across the fine line dividing "derivative storytelling and tacky-looking ghosts on an absurdly over-designed set" from "derivative storytelling that has a really fucking kickass centerpiece that ends up making the whole movie a worthwhile experience". Absent that - and there really isn't even a feint in that direction - the sequel reveals just how threadbare the whole affair is, cobbling together ghost story clichés into a framework where it feels like a third of the scenes are missing: not just the ones explaining the backstory from the first movie, but more prosaic matters like, how does Eve go from riding into town with the hunky pilot (Jeremy Irvine) to poking around in a derelict basement all by herself? Meanwhile, the scenes that are present are trite muddles, doling out tragic backstories for two of the three adult characters with more than two scenes of screentime, and wandering away from the central action in a way that makes it clear that the filmmakers have no sense of what any of the characters are doing when they're not onscreen.

Tom Harper, the director, tries to keep this stitched together more or less by marching through reasonably well-timed jump scares at a steady pace, but even if it worked, that would feel like a cheap substitute for atmosphere and a real sense of the decaying dread that Eel Marsh House is meant to evoke. And for that, Harper and his cinematographer, George Steel, would need to abandon their weird hang-up about overlighting to make sure we can see everything clearly, even when story context - or just plain basic visual continuity - demand murkier blacks.

The film feels composed out of almost nothing but half-measures and recycled ideas, and the result is worse than terrible: it's astoundingly mediocre and plodding. The surprisingly good cast provides something that resembles life - Fox has a terrific sweet, plucky screen presence, and I'm very eager for her to get a better part in a more functional story - and I rather admire the way that the art team (the production designer is Jacqueline Abrahams, the supervising art director is Andrew Munro) aged the garish sets from the first movie into something still more ominous and rundown, but for the most part, Angel of Death is such a slack, by-the-numbers haunted hose story that it's not even up to the task of being bad.

4/10

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: PSYCHO KNOCK-OFFS

There's little doubt that the heyday of Hammer Film Productions in the 1960s is now best-known for the studio's Gothic horror, films with Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Dr. Frankenstein, and such. But while those films were being produced, Hammer was also busily cranking out a far less visible, though still awfully prolific, run of movies that were referred to, with admirable honesty of purpose, as their "mini-Hitchcocks": cheap little shockers that were all made to cash in on the insane killer movie craze that had been triggered by Hitch's Psycho in 1960. If these films haven't remained alive the way that Hammer's glossier, more directly horror-driven movies of the same period have, we must admit that it's because they're not, in the main, quite as good; they were by and large not made by the studio's A-list talent, and their budgets were lower. But there's a level of blunt grubbiness to the best of them which makes them pretty effective regardless of their limited polish and ambition.

Not the best of these, though probably the most high-profile owing to the presence of a relatively major star in the cast, is 1965's Fanatic: it also has far and away the most amazing title of any of them, at least in America, where it was renamed by distributor Columbia with the somewhat more lurid title Die! Die! My Darling! Which actually shows up (though without the exclamation points) in the film's dialogue, so at least it wasn't sheer random exuberant tastelessness on Columbia's part for the sake of it.

Anyway, this particular Psycho knock-off switches things up in some fun ways: instead of a deranged son obsessively keeping the memory of his dead mother alive in some very disturbing ways, Fanatic is about a mother who has devoted herself a little too fixedly to honoring the memory of her dead son. And just to cover its exploitation movie bases, it also borrows liberally from 1962's What Happened to Baby Jane?, in using a living legend of Old Hollywood in the role of a menacing old lady. In this case, Tallulah Bankhead, the hedonist's hedonist from the Roaring Twenties, places the part of a former wild woman of the theater world who has spent most of her days in profoundly unyielding religious asceticism. Which can absolutely not be an accident, and if nothing else, it suggests that producer Anthony Hinds was approaching this project with a little more braininess than some of his other wannabe Psycho pictures.

The plot is simple enough: visiting American Patricia Carroll (Stefanie Powers) is in England to marry her fiancé Alan Glentower (Maurice Kaufmann) - a rather peremptory, bossy bastard, and the film doesn't do nearly enough to call him on it - and decides that the right thing to do would be to visit the mother of her dead former lover Stephen Trefoile. Trekking out to the small village where Mrs. Trefoile (Bankhead) lives, Patricia finds a bizarre, insular little hyper-religious compound inhabited by the none-too-devout Harry (Peter Vaughn) and Anna (Yootha Joyce), a married couple working as servants and waiting out Mrs. Trefoile's death and the inheritance Harry, her only living relative, will receive; and Joseph (Donald Sutherland), a mentally disabled handyman. Things immediately seem off with the whole situation, but it takes until the second day, when Mrs. Trefoile starts going on about how Patricia and Stephen were basically already married and that means that Patricia needs to remain devoted, pure and committed to the unendurable Puritanical lifestyle practice at the house of Trefoile, and it becomes very clear, very quickly, that the old woman is extremely willing to go to homicidal lengths to protect Patricia's sanctity and thus Stephen's purity in heaven.

It is, top to bottom, the Tallulah Bankhead Show. Nobody in the cast comes even close to making the same impression he does: Sutherland, in one of his earliest roles, is effectively odd and creepy, but much underused, Joyce plays one brittle chord over and over, Vaughn has a nice piggy menace to him, but the writing doesn't give him enough to work with, and Powers is at her best in the early going, when she can still be a bit saucy and flippant; when the time comes for Patricia to start being terrified for her life, and to start her frenzied attempts to escape, Powers never quite rounds the corner where it feels like she's actually aware that she's not in control. Also, the American actress plays an American character with an odd but unmistakable hint of a British accent.

Bankhead, though, is just plain incendiary. Is it something of a Bette Davis in Baby Jane impression? It is. But a good one, and Bankhead's facility with over-emphasised bitchery, present in her screen acting from way back (I know nothing of her reputation onstage, though I believe it to have been impressive), suits her well even when the motivations for that bitchery need to be completely re-oriented. Hammy, domineering authority came beautifully to the actor, and she blows through Fanatic with a performance scaled the rafters, just big enough that it's still believably terrifying when she turns into a real menace and not the oddball zealot of the film's first act.

I cannot imagine the film working nearly as well without Bankhead's performance. The script - adapted by the great genre master Richard Matheson from Anne Blaisdell's novel Nightmare - is solid enough, though Matheson had better work throughout his career, and the "hurr hurr, religious folks are crazy" tone in the early going is a bit too self-congratulatory. It's very meat-and-potatoes storytelling, though, palpably anxious to be filled in with depth and complexity and interest by the filmmakers. Bankhead, of course, is great. Cinematographer Arthur Ibbetson, creating weird tensions from filtered daylight in the big old house, is great, even when he indulges in some ecstatically stylish but none too sensible colored lighting tricks near the end. Production designer Peter Proud, whose work I do not otherwise know, is pretty close to great, creating an impressively neat and fussy country home that feels like a whole human life was lived there, in an oppressive way that leaves no room for the present, with all that past crowding it.

But nothing else is great, or near great. Silvio Narizzano's direction - he'd mostly worked in television prior to this, and would the following year make the tedious kitchen sink comedy Georgy Girl - doesn't lean nearly heavily enough on the plot to keep things moving at an increasingly fevered pitch; towards the end, when Mrs. Trefoile has finally jumped from "punishing fanatic" to "homicidal maniac", the film starts to lose momentum in exactly the wrong way; the last 20 minutes of the film are also the paciest and in many ways the least interesting. Narizzano's lifts from Hitchcok are generally solid - the swinging lamp from the climax of Psycho puts in a cameo - and he's good at fixing the camera on Bankhead and Sutherland's faces, just letting them be tense, but he mostly seems to have been more animated by making a brittle black comedy than a thriller, and there's nothing in the back half of the film that's can really be defended as comic. Parts of the first third, accordingly, are the strongest, when the film is still mostly a broad culture-clash: the staging of Mrs. Trefoile's droning recitation of verses from Deuteronomy, with overworked dramatic music on the soundtrack (courtesy of Wilfred Josephs) is one of the highlights in this respect, and most everything Powers does throughout the expository scenes is laced with enough acerbic Modern Woman tang to give it some ironic heft. I am especially fond of the cheeky humor of the opening credits (the sequence has no individually credited designer) with music and color playfully commenting on the film's impending cat and mouse gamesmanship.

But none of these things are really in the film's best interests as a thriller about a crazy old woman, and that is, after all, what Fanatic is. Bankhead and the general atmosphere are enough to haul it over the finish line, and there are some individually creepy moments scattered throughout, but on the whole, the movie is too genteel. Too nice. It never entirely feels like Patricia is in danger, only a particularly severe form of inconvenience, and the general scope, if not the details, of the outcome are rarely in doubt. There's enough here to please hagsploitation fans, but there are so many little and significant ways that the movie could be better without even touching its best elements that it's hard to feel that this is more than a satisfactory Hammer B-side, and certainly no thriller classic.

Body Count: 2, the exact same number as Psycho, though the function those bodies serve in the narrative is totally different.

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PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR

We must say this for The Quiet Ones: it's not lazy. As befits the august brand name of Hammer Film Productions, it is an attempt to do something with the most bland, generic gimcrackery of contemporary horror cinema, rather than simply giving into clichés and marketing concerns. It is idea-driven, rather than incident-driven, and it baldly asks complicated, unresolvable questions about how we know what we know, and what intellectual humility should attach itself to scientific progress. As a cinematic construct, it puts in a striking attempt to do something with the "looking through a camera and recording horrifying stuff" that, as far as I know, has never been done or even come close to being done in the way it is here. It is classy and restrained, with some of its tensest moments punctuated by a slow, confused release that comes when, despite the characters' (and the well-trained audience's) best expectations, there isn't a screaming nightmare beast jumping into frame from a dark corner. All in all, the film could be quite a great piece of genre work, except for the critical fault that it just isn't very successful at any of its high-minded ambitions.

After some reflection, I'm convinced that has a lot to do with the structure of the thing. The story - under the usual dubious "inspired by a true story" banner (among other small details, both the year and the continent have been changed) - takes place in and near Oxford, England, in 1974, where bossy professor Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) has assembled a small team to help him with a kind of paranormal investigation: his student-lover Krissi Dalton (Erin Richards), her other lover and fellow student Harry Abrams (Rory Fleck-Byrne), and Brian McNeil (Sam Claflin), who isn't a student at all, but an employee of the Oxford audio-visual department, hired on to film the proceedings. Those proceedings are all about the gaunt, mentally unwell Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke), who suffers from what any normally superstitious person would identify on the spot as a demonic possession, but Coupland has other ideas: he's convinced that Jane simply has an excess of undigested emotional trauma from a past she can't consciously access, and all the supernatural things going on around her are solely the result of her overabundance of negative energy. His hope is that by curing her and proving himself right, he can cure all mental illness and "ghosts" in the world in one go.

For reasons that are decently plausible, this investigation ends up needing to take place in a rickety old house in the country that damn well ought to be haunted, and the creepy surroundings, coupled with the isolation, ends up making everybody pretty miserable, except for Coupland himself. The experiments seem to be heading in no direction at all, but it's increasingly clear, that, if nothing else, something is wrong with Jane, and it's starting to get a lot worse, and a lot stronger.

So, what was I talking about, when I mentioned the structure? Simply this: the film is a combination of footage from Brian's camera, and ordinary third-person filmmaking, and despite everything I'm about to say, the movie earns this much praise: it's not capricious or arbitrary in the shift from one perspective to the other. The Quiet Ones is mostly not about the existence or not of ghosts, or telekinesis, or whatever other spookiness attends to the plot: mostly, it's about the limitations of perception and the way that our understanding of the truth is filtered through what we see and recognise. Director John Pogue and his collaborators have clearly put some thought into how they can best explore that by defining the limitations of first-person storytelling and breaking out of it when necessary, with the film cleaving neatly into portions where the presence of the camera augments our sense of what's going on and what we're not seeing. The problem is that the film so obviously flaunts this very central element of its construction that the whole thing feels like a metanarrative game, a postmodern riff on horror rather than an actual expression of horror. Watching the film feels like looking through an increasingly diffuse series of plastic blocks, with the actual content trapped beneath one too many layers of separation that, while it might be intellectually sound, is utterly deadening on both dramatic and generic levels. The film manages at times to be effectively creepy - and I've already mentioned how cleverly the filmmakers indulge in scenes that lead up to jump scares that don't end up happening, giving the film a taut, unresolved feeling that works in its favor. But the whole thing is so beholden to alienation effects that it's really hard to ever care - and that's deadly for building scares.

Inasmuch as the film clings together at all, it's almost solely because of Harris, whose brusque, short-tempered academic know-it-all is a flawless depiction of a certain kind of bullying smugness, wholeheartedly convinced of its own all-round righteousness. And this is only sharpened when Coupland's theories are as specious, and as obviously wrong, as The Quiet Ones consistently depicts them as being; in the final act, as one of several howlingly ill-advised shock revelations, the committee-written script (Pogue, Craig Rosenberg, and Oren Moverman adapting a script originally by Tom de Ville) gives Coupland a reason for being so ruinously fixated on his pet theories and the ad hoc methods he uses to test them, but the film is far better when he's just a tenured jerk drunk on the ability to do whatever he wants and have admiring students line up to be abused and exploited by his bellowing refusal to even consider other ideas besides the ones he's chosen.

When it's primarily about the three people (four, if we count the not-quite-there Jane; Cooke's performance is the film's second-best as surely as Harris's is the best, though with much more of a stock figure to play) being caught up in Coupland's falling-apart theories, The Quiet Ones damn near works as a horror-tinged chamber drama; when it is about spooky, underlit houses with inexplicable goings-on - and it becomes this more and more as it progresses - it's merely adequate at best, and frequently not even that. There's a pervasive sense that it hadn't all been worked out quite when the script was finished, and the pacing is off, the parameters of the plot seem to keep shifting when we're not looking, and I really can't say enough bad things about the last 10 minutes and the revelations included in them. I admire the notion behind The Quiet Ones, and I'm glad that the rebuilding Hammer would rather make this kind of conceptual horror than the utterly dismal found footage junk food that dominates the genre nowadays; but we don't give out points for effort here, and whatever merit the idea has, the execution leaves everything to be desired.

5/10

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LET'S HAVE A BIG HAND FOR THE MUMMY

How would you suppose that a film titled Blood from the Mummy's Tomb would begin? Would you guess that it would be with resolutely generic sans-serif titles over a starfield, all space movie-like? If so, congratulations on your insight, and also, what the hell, because I, for one, was so thrown by the opening title that I fast-forwarded a bit to make sure the suspiciously generic DVD I got from Netflix wasn't just some lousy bootleg thing. But no, that's legitimately how the film opens - plain yellow titles on a starfield.

As it turns out, that's not even a completely random imagee: stars end up playing a significant role in Blood from the Mummy's Tomb. More significant, certainly, than mummies, of which there are none. Not as classically-defined, at least. There is a perfectly-preserved body found in an ancient Egyptian tomb, belonging to the witch queen Tara (Valerie Leon), but mummification has absolutely nothing to do with her preservation. There are absolutely none of the narrative touchstones common to mummy films (revenge for desecration, cultists as the villains), except for the modern woman who is a dead ringer for an ancient woman, and even that is played in a wholly different. The plot, adapted from Bram Stoker's novel Jewel of the Seven Stars, involves the ghost of the wicked queen attempting to force a team of archaeologists to stage a ritual resurrecting her in the body of one of the men's daughter, and while the whole "evil ghost wants to be reborn" detail is perhaps a bit tired and overdone as a scenario in its own right, you have to allow that it's not predictable from the onset.

The genre-savvy viewer, confronted with both the production company (Hammer Films) and the year of release (1971) will instantly realise that Blood from the Mummy's Tomb is one of the many products of the period when Hammer was starting to flail about horribly, looking for any way to stay fresh and vital in the marketplace it had basically invented at the end of the '50s. As has been discussed so often by so many writers, the loosening of standards in the late '60s was not kind at all to the studio whose Super Edgy plunges into sex and violence consisted of busty women with low-cut tops and a bit more stage blood than anybody had seen before. When extreme gore and full-on nudity entered the cinematic lexicon at the end of the decade, Hammer turned, in the blink of an eye, from the producer of particularly adult horror into a fusty, old-fashioned bunch of conservative Brits, out of touch and stalled in past glories. This was not a fate the company accepted blindly, but attempt to actively combat with many experiments both fascinating and humiliating in the early '70s.

In the particular case of Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, we have, first, the setting: though it's never completely insisted-upon by Christopher Wicking's script, the costumes and sets make it absolutely clear that this is a contemporary-set film, something that Hammer rarely dabbled in much, and never before their earnest attempts to retain young viewers kicked into high gear around this time. Second, we have a few shots of posterior nudity, performed by a body double, and a costume for the lifeless Tara that reveals as much boob as you can possibly show, from all different angles, and still claim that you've got the actress wearing "clothing", and this is not performed by a body double. Third, there is quite a lot of blood - nothing that registers as "graphic", three years after Night of the Living Dead, but the movie's title isn't messing around, what with the repeated image of Tara's right arm, terminating in a stump, dripping bright red blood for punctuation. Or, for that matter, the repeated image of Tara's hand, crawling around like a hellish little crab. Or the way that every person who dies has the same ripped-out throat effect that is, in truth, not very convincing. But it does speak to Hammer's desire to be more vicious and brutal as cinema generally moved in that direction.

Anyway, setting aside completely the matters of Valerie Leon's underboob or bloody stumps, it's all rather zesty and weird. It opens with Margaret Fuchs (Leon) having nightmares of Tara's execution, done with far more coherence-breaking editing than one would ever expect from a Hammer production, particularly one that was left to be finished by Michael Carreras, Hammer executive and largely unimaginative director, after the first director, Seth Holt, died during filmmaking. At no point does the film return to something as elliptically-assembled as this initial dream sequence, but there are quite a few points (mostly related to Margaret's personality being taken over by Tara's) where it at least manages to get good and weird, and the overall feeling of the movie is that it's far more unhinged as a piece of filmmaking than the stately, handsome Hammer films of yore.

And this is mostly reflected in the story, which is clear enough, as such things go, but fully commits to the somewhat random and inexplicable sense of things going badly wrong more typical of fiction from Stoker's era than from the film's own (I have not, I should admit, read Jewel of the Seven Stars). Tara's evil is never clarified or defined; it is wickedness at a cosmic level, not a personal one, and this applies even, in a degree, to the way she makes her evil manifest: Margaret's father, Julian (Andrew Keir), and his colleagues Corbeck (James Villiers) and Berrigan (George Coulouris) are all pawns in Tara's game, but how that happened, beyond "she spread her evil influence upon them" is left refreshingly unexplored. It's a story in which bad things just are, and the good characters try to resist them, weakly. Possibly my favorite aspect of the narrative is Margaret, who at times, for no reason, simply goes bad, with Leon (a Carry On... veteran presumably cast for her looks first) doing a surprisingly great job of blanking out her humanity at places, and suggesting in a creepy way that Margaret somewhat enjoys the feeling of being taken over by a merciless ghost witch. It's underplayed well by both the actress and her director(s), happening so inexplicably that it makes watching the film similar to being in it, at least to judge from how all of the good characters seem to keep getting blindsided by the terrible things happening to them (best moment: Rosalie Crutchley's spiritual medium having a flat-out panic attack in the moment she realises that she's about to die).

The whole thing ends up being far more of a psychological horror film than I'd have ever expected, heavily invested in the fear of losing one's mind to a malevolent force on the one hand, and the fear of not being sure who you're looking at when you stare into "friendly" eyes on the other (the film's final shot, something of a cheap joke on mummies, carries this latter them right up to the end). On the whole, it's not the most sophisticated thing Hammer ever made (it's a bit too bright, the makeup isn't very good, and there's a lot of repetition for just 93 minutes), and it's hard not to wish the same script had been made with a stronger overall cast, but it's moodier than it had reason to be, and brainier, too. Turns out that the only thing keeping mummy films from reaching their full potential as troubling stories of murder and psychosis were the mummies.

Reviews in this series
The Mummy (Fisher, 1959)
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (Carreras, 1964)
The Mummy's Shroud (Gilling, 1967)
Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (Holt and Carreras, 1971)

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BEYOND THE VEIL OF MUMMY

The Mummy's Shroud, Hammer Films' 1967 entry into their continuity-free mummy franchise, is typically regarded as pretty damn bad - or at least, pretty damn run-of-the-mill and boring, which is surely worse. I can't help but feel like that's a pretty unfair way of looking at it; if we want to compare to Hammer's earlier The Mummy, then no, it's patently inferior, but there are between 0 and 1 mummy films in all history better than Hammer's The Mummy. We might also compare it to the same company's The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, and The Mummy's Shroud is so much better than that, there's hardly anything to talk about at all. For all the talk of how mummy films are basically the same story, I find that The Mummy's Shroud is actually somewhat original, being structured rather unexpectedly on the And Then There Were None model of assembling victims in an enclosed environment and then watching them try to squirm out while being killed one by one. More importantly, after The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, it's such a relief to have something that looks halfway decent on the level of production design and lighting that I'd probably give it an enthusiastic pass even if it had, demonstrably, the worst script in the history of mummy cinema. Hammer Films, after all, was all about the mise en scène, the creation of heavily artificial, spooky locations; with that in hand (and while The Mummy's Shroud is hardly the best-looking film Hammer ever made, it's a solid piece of work), the rest simply doesn't seem to matter as much.

At any rate, I could definitely feel myself relaxing at the point where director John Gilling (one of Hammer's unsung heroes - prior to this, he'd overseen The Pirates of Blood River and The Plague of the Zombies, a pair of absolutely essential Hammer B-sides) and cinematographer Arthur Grant elected to stage the pathways inside an ancient Egyptian tomb with almost hilariously over-the-top shadows and close, choking angles, by which point The Mummy's Curse had already wandered in both good and bad directions. The first of these bad directions is a lengthy prologue recounting how in Pharaonic times, the young son (Toolsie Persaud) of the Pharaoh (Bruno Barnabe) incited the ire of the king's brother, who arranged to have the child killed; the loyal guard Prem (Dickie Owen) was able to save the child from the coup, only to watch helplessly as he died in the desert. Wrapping the boy in a shroud and having the natural processes of the desert mummify him, Prem commits himself to eternal watchfulness. That's a whole lot of onscreen effort to get us to the standard-issue plot point of "killer mummy defending an ancient tomb from desecration", with the action being staged in a (perhaps deliberately) stilted, pantomimed way, and involving some of the absolute worst sets that Hammer ever tried to sell an audience.

On the other hand, we've also met the rather unusual cast of characters active this time around: in Cairo, in 1920, the wealthy industrialist Stanley Preston (John Phillips) and his awesomely passive-aggressive wife Barbara (Elizabeth Sellars) have come to Egypt to check on the efforts to find a missing archaeological expedition that Preston is paying for, and more to the point, to find their son Paul (David Buck), a member of that expedition. In this, Preston is aided by the appalling toady Longbarrow (Michael Ripper), who is unbelievably cowed by the other man's riches and prestige.

The expedition has been done in by a sandstorm, though its leader, Sir Basil Walden (André Morell) is convinced that they're practically on top of the tomb he's been hunting for. And of course that's exactly what turns out to be the case, and over the hysterical objections of local expert Hasmid (Roger Delgado), Sir Basil, Paul, and Claire de Sangre (Maggie Kimberly) enter the tomb and thus we arrive at that beautifully-lit stuff I was talking about, but only after being well-introduced to the eccentric sense of humor that pops up in unexpected places throughout the film, and to the weird character dynamics that will dominate the rest of the feature. The psychological balance of this film is downright perverse, next to all the other mummy films; unlike so many insane cultists before him, Hasmid (who in the natural order of things, is the one who uses an ancient scroll to raise the body of Prem as avenger against the despoilers of the prince's tomb) isn't really much of a presence in a film where the tensions between the bedraggled and distraught Sir Basil, suffering from a curse-induced snake bite, the avaricious, lying Preston, and the morally upright Paul are all much more the driving point of the plot, and whose most distinctive personality is surely Longbarrow, the role that gave Hammer stalwart Ripper his absolute best opportunity ever to show off in a more substantial, peculiar role than he normally got; and oh, how the actor took that opportunity and ran with it all the way. His Longbarrow is unlikably pathetic, but also too miserable not to feel sorry for; the perfect contrast to Preston, showing via reflection how the rich prig is as much an antagonist as the mummy is, the perfect embodiment of the future cliché of the snobby fuck who comes along just so we can root for his death.

In fact, one of the things that is oddest to me about The Mummy's Shroud (and perhaps explains its weak reputation) is that it's at its worst when the mummy is around. Played by stuntman Eddie Powell, the mummified Prem isn't necessarily bad as a threatening presence, and there are some fine moments of people being terrified to see him - there is a blood-red scene in a photography developing lab that works fantastically on entirely that basis, like something from a giallo of the same era - but the mummy himself is pretty damn bad. The facial prosthetic makes no attempt to look like anything but a mask (maybe another giallo touchstone? Assuming that any of this was happening deliberately), and not even a mummy mask, necessarily. There's a close-up of the mummy's eyes slowly opening that is simply appalling in its failure to resemble what it's nominally depicting in anything but the most abstract sense, and this is the worst moment in a strong of truly awful shots that cannot hide (though some of them try very hard) what a cheap piece of crap the monster is here. And yet his final destruction is just about the most striking thing in the whole film, for reasons entirely due to the special effects, so who knows.

More to the point, though, outside of the darkroom scene and a few individually striking shots, Gilling is plainly more interested in the human drama than the mummy horror at all points in the film. There simply isn't much variety or inspiration to the mummy attacks, which are kept to a bare minimum in the script, content instead to dole out plummy lines for actors who all give pretty fascinating, exaggerated performances that frequently verge on some kind of comedy that's more about being strange than being funny (outside of the young couple, because this is a Hammer production, and they were required to be milquetoast nothings). The human element of the film has a warped tone that makes the whole thing far more interesting than its mummy attacks would suggest; that said, anyone who requires good mummy attacks in a mummy film (this is a reasonable expectation) is probably not going to get much out of the film compared to someone who merely prefers good mummy attacks in a mummy film. Its strange pleasures are very real and pervasive, but they are almost directly opposed to its qualities as a horror picture, which on the whole I'd be inclined to describe as "good enough", outside of some awfully fine lighting. You can't have everything.

Reviews in this series
The Mummy (Fisher, 1959)
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (Carreras, 1964)
The Mummy's Shroud (Gilling, 1967)
Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (Holt and Carreras, 1971)

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GETTING THE BANDAGE BACK TOGETHER

In 1964, Hammer Films was in the midst of its most prolific era of making popular genre films - at a glance I'd set the golden years between '62 and '67, with the balance favoring the middle of that window - having turned the early Gothic horror successes into a brand name in virtually no time at all, and firmly entrenching itself as the English-speaking world's most reliable vendor of edgy horror and horror-adjacent cinema. We needn't rehearse the titles; it was simply a fine time for the company's very characteristic style, and indeed it was over this period that the style became fully characteristic. All of which makes it especially hard to stomach The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb which isn't a sequel to Hammer's 1959 version of The Mummy at all, but I don't know what else to call it; a spin-off? A spiritual remake? A ratty cash-in? Yeah, let's go with that last one.

For the really, incredibly obvious thing about The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, as becomes obvious from the instant the opening credits start up, is that it is cheap as all hell. Those credits take place over a single long take of the camera moving across a pile of ancient riches taken from (presumably) a mummy's tomb, and between the flat lighting and the quality of the props, there's no doubting at all that we're looking at plaster and plastic and desperation; there might not ever be a point in the rest of the film where that looks as patently artificial, but there's hardly anything that seriously challenges this first impression. And this is especially sad, because if there was one thing that made Hammer Films special from a production standpoint, it's the creative ways the directors and cinematographers found to hide the low budget. Just a year prior, Hammer had produced The Pirates of Blood River, a movie seemingly designed from the ground up to prove that you could make an exciting pirate film without having enough money to set any scenes onboard a ship.

And yet here's The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, looking as tattered and chintzy as any Poverty Row film from the '40s. The indifferently-painted backdrops, the unconvincing make-up: this is, I think, what happens when you have people without training in making these kind of low-budget, atmosphere-driven horror films bear the weight fo making. For the problems, though they extend beyond the lighting, are always made worst because of the lighting, as though cinematographer Otto Heller had absolutely no clue how to deal with the emotional needs of the genre. Which, given the total absence of horror anywhere else in his filmography, is almost certainly the case.

For there is one of the other problems, surely the biggest single reason that this picture feels hardly at all like a Hammer film: it is hardly a Hammer film. For reasons that a sufficiently devoted researcher could undoubtedly scrounge up, if he was motivated for whatever reason to pretend that this film was worth the time, The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb wasn't shot at Hammer's home turf of Bray Studios, but at Elstree Studios, and almost entirely with people who lacked any previous experience with the production company. The most important Hammer veteran in the crew, in fact, was producer/director/writer Michael Carreras, son of the company's co-founder Sir James Carreras, and responsible for producing the lion's share of movies released during the company's best years. He was not, however, nearly as prolific a director, and there is not much of anything in this movie to suggest that this was a terrible loss to the corpus of British horror. It is a singularly tension-free movie that Carreras wrought; almost more interesting in being a mystery-slash-treasure hunt to bother being a thriller about a rampaging mummy.

The film opens in Egypt in 1900, in the company of a man (Bernard Rebel) being chased down by a pack of cultists who tie him down and cut off his hand in a shot that demonstrates, vividly, that the filmmakers are more concerned with the idea of appalling gore than with halfway-decent effects work. This turns out to be a certain Dubois, as we'll only learn after his death is discovered by the members of the archaeological dig he's been working with: expedition leader Sir Giles Dalrymple (Jack Gwillim), John Bray (Ronald Howard), and Dubois's daughter and Bray's ladyfriend Annette (Jeanne Roland, with a hellacious overdubbed French accent). They're all very sad at this tragedy, for about three seconds, after which time they get back to celebrating their new discovery, the tomb of Ra-Antef, lost son of Ramses VIII. Two other people show up with a special interest in the treasures and beautifully-preserved mummy in this tomb: Hashmi Bey (George Pastell), offering a huge sum of money to keep the findings in the Cairo Museum, and spectacularly crass American Alexander King (Fred Clark), the dig's financier, for whom even a huge sum of money isn't enough; he wants a daft and perverse sum of money, and he's going to get it by putting together an Egyptian roadshow themed around the curse of the tomb, charging people ten cents to risk the wrath of the ancient pharaohs, correctly assuming that audiences would adore that kind of hokey spookiness.

The first stop is in England, and on the ship there, an amateur Egyptologist by the name of Adam Beauchamp (Terence Morgan) finds the team, impressing them with his rather inexplicable knowledge of their find, and seducing Annette right out from under Bray's nose. This tepid little romantic triangle is just a blind though, for Beauchamp has darker secrets, involving an amulet whose purpose none of the archaeologists have been able to figure out, though we in the audience, still waiting for something that even vaguely resembles a killer mummy by the time the film enters its back half, possess a pretty clear sense of what the amulet does, and what Beauchamp wants to do with it, if not exactly why.

The final 15 minutes of The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb have the real merit of being batshit crazy, if nothing else, so I have to respect that about the movie - any time that a twist ending so ballsy and stupid is whipped out with so little apology, the screenwriter has my undivided attention, if not necessarily my respect. It's especially welcome in this film, coming as it does after over an hour of the most tedious wrangling of characters and too much plot (a huckster American showman trying to put together a mummy cabaret is one thing, and I'm already not sure it's the right thing for a Hammer film; but presenting the entirety of his floor show is absolutely deadening). Even by the standards of a Hammer film with all the reliable stock company members left out, the acting is dreadful: Morgan makes for an especially uncompelling romantic foil/secret villain, and even without taking the dubbing into account, Roland's boggle-eyed overreacting, in her feature film debut (and the only big role she ever had), puts her high in the running for worst female lead in any Hammer film ever, and that is a singularly competitive race. Ronald Howard comes across well just for being unmemorable. I suppose Clark's broad Ugly American routine is amusing enough, though mostly because he has personality, and very little else does.

The worst thing, though, is probably the mummy, played by Dickie Owen, combining the cheap production values with poor acting and unmotivated storytelling to create a perfect crystallisation of everything wrong with the film. It's an especially stupid-looking make-up job, like a papier-mâché mask without breathing holes and only the most rudimentary eye holes; the monster is accompanied by a rasping, Darth Vader-esque breathing noise on the soundtrack that is the exact opposite of scary; the killing scenes are awkwardly staged with no eye towards emphasising the mummy's menace or strength. It's not a remotely credible threat, and with so much misfiring in The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, the absence of even a satisfyingly creepy mummy is an absolute film-killing flaw.

Reviews in this series
The Mummy (Fisher, 1959)
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (Carreras, 1964)
The Mummy's Shroud (Gilling, 1967)
Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (Holt and Carreras, 1971)

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THE CYCLE OF REINCARNATION

The transformation of Hammer Films into the world's most prominent home for edgy, brutal, sexy genre films was completed almost entirely on the backs of 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein and 1958's Dracula, released in America as Horror of Dracula (the fuse was, however, lit by the violent sci-fi/horror film The Quatermass Xperiment). And as has been noted by pretty much everybody, these are the same two stories - though in the opposite order - that kicked off Universal's industry-defining run of horror films in the early '30s, which may or may not have been a deliberate choice. I think the one thing we can say for certain is that Universal's films had ensured that those characters would be especially prominent in the minds of horror film audiences, and the books were in the public domain and could be readily adapted.

The third major Hammer horror film, though, is the one where the studio finally, explicitly, remade a Universal classic, or rather a Universal series: despite its title, The Mummy of 1959 isn't based exclusively or even primarily on the 1932 Boris Karloff vehicle that more or less invented the idea of mummies as terrifying monsters. It is something of a condensed version of that film and the four unrelated mummy films Universal released in the 1940s, filtered through the Gothic sensibility of irreplaceable screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, and given all kinds of broody, British menace by director Terence Fisher, who wrenched the character of Kharis the living mummy violently from his cheesy B-movie roots and turned him into a figure of real danger.

The jump in quality is swift and absolute. It's amazing how the exact same elements - mummies recognize dead lovers from across the millennia, a fez-wearing acolyte of an ancient cult carting a mummy across the sea to wreak revenge - can be so much less hokey and so much more threatening with just a little bit better lighting and better acting - not even better acting across the board, really. As with most Hammer films of this vintage, it's Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee standing head and shoulders above the rest of the cast, made of solid, redoubtably British men, and women cast almost exclusively for their cup size.

It does prove, though, the difference between Lon Chaney, Jr. in the depths of his alcoholic loathing for the roles he was given, and Lee right at the moment that he had everything in the world to prove, having been more or less universally considered one of the key elements of both Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula, in both cases playing the iconic monster. Going three-for-three must have seemed essential to the upcoming actor (Christopher Lee, an upcoming actor! Almost as weird as the eternally patriarchal Peter Cushing playing a middle-aged man's son, but he does so here), who had not yet proven that he could do anything else, and needed to keep his swiftly-growing fanbase happy with his pantomime monsters if his career was going to keep evolving. It's not nearly as far to compare Lee to Karloff - their respective characters are written to be entirely different things - but if you put a gun to my head, yeah. I like Lee better than Karloff, as well. There would seem to be only so many things you could do as an actor with an unspeaking character that shuffles around and strangles people, particularly when burdened by the colossally unfortunate makeup Lee is made to wear, looking neither "face covered in rotted bandages", nor " desiccated human flesh", but "mud shaped into a wrinkly ball, with no particularly discernible facial features. Effectively, Lee has to be threatening, and later on torn with passion for his lost love, using virtually no other part of his body besides his eyes. And he does this superbly - his mummy isn't a patch on his justly legendary Dracula, but it's every bit the equal to his beloved Frankenstein monster.

That being said, the mummy barely appears - without a stopwatch in hand, I'd estimate that it's the least screentime Lee had in any of the three movies - and doesn't even start to appear until well into the movie. This is the Cushing show through and through, and though he reads onscreen as too old to play the character as the screenplay necessarily calls him out to be, he's still excellent as the heroic, thoughtful archaeologist John Banning, who was part of the 1895 Egyptian expedition that discovered the lost tomb of the Princess Ananka, guarded by the undying mummy Kharis, who in life was Ananka's secret lover (a fact we don't learn until well into the movie, during a lengthy history lesson which provides Lee with his only chance to speak - and wear bronzer to play a rather dubious Egyptian - but is otherwise the one outstanding mistake of the screenplay, punching the dramatic momentum right in the face, right in the middle). This latter fact is only discovered by John''s father Stephen (Felix Aylmer), who goes mad as a result, carrying us on a really elegant transition to 1898, and the asylum where the old man now gibbers about mummies.

It's at this time that the nefarious Mehemet Bey (George Pastell), priest of the ancient religion of Karnak (which Sangster explicitly holds to be the name of a god, an historical mistake the Universal films only made implicitly) arrives in England with Kharis in tow and vengeance on his mind. It occurs to me that one big reason that The Mummy is so much better than the later Universal pictures is that England in 1898 is a better place all around for a rampaging mummy to go on a revenge spree than New England in the 1940s, or Louisiana in whatever time frame it's meant to be. The mummy is accidentally dumped in a bog thanks to the interference of a couple of colorful locals, but raised successfully once Bey retrieves the Scroll of Life from the Banning collection, a narrative circuit that exists primarily to justify copying the wonderful "mummy comes out of the swamp" sequence from Universal's The Mummy's Curse. And from here on you can probably guess - Jimmy Sangster was a great, perhaps even revolutionary horror screenwriter, but he wasn't Christ come down off the mountain, and he still couldn't come up with better things for a mummy to do than wander into rooms and strangle people. Although he did come up with far better setpieces that make it much clearer why the victims couldn't just run, and the matter of Kharis's seemingly-resurrected lover, in the form of John's wife Isobel (Yvonne Furneaux), is at least refreshed in that she isn't an outright reincarnation, but merely a living woman with an uncommonly close resemblance to the dead Ananka. And she's given somewhat more interesting and active things to do to help stop the mummy than the bulk of the Universal heroines.

If I have any reservations to speak of with Hammer's Mummy, it's of a somewhat petty sort: basically, that it's not nearly up to the standards of the two major horror films preceding it. That's undoubtedly got something to do with the setting; vague European locales make for better Gothic fantasylands than anyplace in Britain, even the deep country where The Mummy takes place. There are still shadows filling the corners of old buildings, but the sense of grand decrepitude that makes Dracula such a visual feast are simply not here in anything like the same degree. And too, Cushing, though he's more than satisfactory as the hero, isn't being challenged as much as he had been in the first two movies, and simply isn't as interesting to watch; he's still a Hammer romantic lead, and they are simply a watery breed, even when they're being played by someone as prickly and authoritative as Cushing.

It also feels just a little bit re-tready: like "more gory, sophisticated Universal horror" was a shtick Hammer was settling into, rather than a well of inspiration (this is especially notable in Franz Reizenstein's score, when it is not being jarringly upbeat). That's almost certainly unfair; it's simply that the same writer, director, and pair of co-stars, along with predominately the same crew (production designer Bernard Robinson and cinematographer Jack Asher chief among them) rather naturally turned up a film that didn't feel hugely different from its predecessors. Still they were all luminously talented men, and the shtick was at this point still a very zesty and fun way of reviving old monsters (and would continue to be with dark/edgy werewolf and Jekyll & Hyde pictures a couple of years down the line). It's still archetypal work by Hammer at probably the strongest point of its history, and it's a completely rewarding dose of highly grim atmosphere and striking imagery.

Reviews in this series
The Mummy (Fisher, 1959)
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (Carreras, 1964)
The Mummy's Shroud (Gilling, 1967)
Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (Holt and Carreras, 1971)

Read More