REVIEW ALL MONSTERS!

In 2014, the world will rejoice and celebrate as one of the most iconic figures in all cinema turns 60 - it is birthday time for Godzilla, greatest of all building-sized movie monsters. To commemorate this event, the first Godzilla movie in a decade will be coming out in May, titled simply, and cleanly, Godzilla (though I'm sure they'll find some way to fuck it up; they want to start a franchise, after all. Godzilla: The Rise of the Monster or something equally crass).

And to commemorate both that movie and the Big G's birthday, I decided to do what I do and fling myself into a big ol' retrospective, and you know what absolutely astonishing thing I found out? There are so many of the damn things that if I want to watch just one every weekend, and still be ready by 16 May, I need to start now. So even though it feels like we haven't fully shaken the dust off from last summer, it's already time to start looking ahead, as I prepare to-

The rules: Every Saturday, a Godzilla film, and since this isn't some cheap attempt to make fun of the character, I'm going to look only at the almost uniformly superior Japanese versions. There are a couple of exceptions; owing to its historical importance, I'll be watching the American recut of the original Godzilla, 1956's beloved Raymond Burr vehicle Godzilla, King of the Monsters in concert with its source material; there are also one or two other films whose Japanese and American versions are so profoundly different at a level deeper than some niceties of emphasis or culturally-specific lines of dialogue that I'll potentially and I do only mean potentially (which is why I'm not naming them) compare both versions of those, as well.

There's more! If I'm going to-

-I want to review all of them, even the ones that aren't in the strict Godzilla continuity. So,in an attempt to comprehensively cover the entirety of the Toho Studios daikaiju bestiary, and to destroy my fucking brain, I will, in between Saturdays, take a look at whatever kaiju films come along at that point chronologically. Though, in a feeble bow to sanity, I'm not going to approach the handful of science fiction films that incidentally but not significantly include the presence of a giant monster that Toho released in the '50s and '60s. Nor will I even ponder reviewing daikaiju eiga from other studios, because shit, I want to talk about anything else at some point between now and May.

The city-levelling madness begins tomorrow!

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AN OCTOBER CATALOGUE, 2013

As always, I'm terrified that in all the crush of reviews that happen in October, someone might have missed one of the sagacious droplets of honeyed wisdom falling from my lips, and this situation cannot hold at all. And so, as I take a well-deserved break from blogging today, let me offer up this list of everything posted here since Wednesday, 9 October.

Films in general release
12 Years a Slave
Captain Phillips
Carrie
Enough Said
The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete
Machete Kills
Runner Runner

Horror Retrospective: Universal and Hammer mummies
The Mummy's Tomb
The Mummy's Ghost
The Mummy's Curse
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy
The Mummy (1959)
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb

Personal Canon
House on Haunted Hill

Italian Horror Blogathon
Dracula 3D

The Film Experience pieces
Essay: The Best Tom Hanks Performances
Essay: American slavery in cinema
Essay: A post-CIFF report on the foreign film submission list
Team Top 10: The Best Classic Horror Films
Team Top 10: The Best Modern Horror Films

Chicago International Film Festival
Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa
Banklady
Battle of Tabatô
Black South-Easter
The Blinding Sunlight
Blue Is the Warmest Color
Borgman
Burn It Up Djassa
Chasing Fireflies
Cheap Thrills
Closed Curtain
Contracted
Dracula 3D
The German Doctor
Go Goa Gone
H4
Heli
Honor Diaries
Illiterate
Imbabazi: The Pardon
Infiltrators
La Paz
The Last of the Unjust
The Miracle
Monsoon Shootout
Mothers
The Notebook
Of Good Report
The Priest's Children
Purgatorio
Raze
Shorts: Animation
Shorts: Night Terrors
Soul
Stop-Over
A Thousand Times Good Night
Trucker and the Fox
Wałęsa: Man of Hope
Die Welt
Yema

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A BLOODY DISASTER

If the new Carrie teaches us anything, it's the importance of casting. I don't know if it's "officially" more of a new adaptation of Stephen King's 1974 debut novel, or more of a remake of the Brian De Palma-directed 1976 classic, but nobody could be stupid enough to suppose that people in the audience aren't going to be mentally making every comparison between that film and this that could possibly be made. And the first and most important point to compare is Carrie White herself: Sissy Spacek's performance is one of the legendary turns in horror cinema, as can be readily appreciated even by somebody like myself, no real fan of that movie. The role calls for a dysfunctionally awkward outsider whose awareness of human behavior and social code is provisional and hastily kludged together; Spacek, who in her youth possessed one of the oddest faces in cinema, slid right into that perfectly. It seemed genuinely probable that she was just as alienated as the script claimed, simply because of how apart Spacek could make herself seem just by projecting the right parts of her angular body. It is masterful, mesmerising stuff.

The new Carrie is played by Chloë Grace Moretz, and I can't think of a worse choice out of all the established actresses in the right age range. Everything that is burned into the character - uncertainty, ignorance, innocence, fear, the inability to fit in - is directly the opposite of everything that Moretz brings to any and every significant performance she's even over the last few years, and though she puts in an extreme effort to play the part like it's been written, it's just that - effort. Extreme effort. Moretz tries her absolute goddamn best to put Carrie over the way that writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacas, dressing up the 1976 version by Lawrence D.Cohen, wrote her, and every bit of the acting process is plainly revealed on her face, which never looks like anything but a contorted death mask until the blood-spattered prom night finale, the one point were the film significantly deviates from earlier movie. And not to its benefit - if Spacek's Carrie exploded in an uncontained fit of rage and humiliation, Moretz's Carrie is making conscious, deliberate choices about who revenge herself on, and visibly enjoying it. Which alters the themes of the story to the point of uselessness.

At which point somebody might well trot out "but it's a different movie!" And the fact of the matter is: no, it's not. It's the same movie, hitting virtually all of the same beats, frequently using functionally identical camera set-ups. If there is any meaningful change to speak of, it's because the new Carrie assumes that it has a much less intelligent audience, one that cannot deal with shaded characterisations, and so requires every member of the cast to be predictable, from their first scene, as a Good person or a Mean person. And the film's prologue, in which Carrie's mother Margaret (a shockingly ineffective Julianne Moore) gives birth to her unwanted daughter, and nearly kills the infant in a fit of religious mania. As though we needed more proof than the story amply provides that Margaret is loony, and has a profoundly unhealthy relationship with her daughter.

That a remake of Carrie should turn out to be a pathetic retread of the same emotions, step-by-step, executed with far less skill and visceral punch is probably to be expected, I guess, though I wasn't really prepared for how entirely lifeless the new film would be at every step. That it is this pathetic and bland while being directed by Kimberly Peirce is confusing as hell. All along, it seemed easy to assume that Peirce, she who directed no less a study of gender roles and physical desire than Boys Don't Cry, was going to make some sort of arch-feminist Carrie, or a Carrie that found bolder ways to elaborate on the theme of pubescence and sexual awakening. Metaphorical sexual awakening is the freebie, with Carrie. So damn me if Peirce didn't end up making a film less involved in female sexuality than De Palma did; the shades and implied complexities involved in Carrie's feelings towards boys are left to one scene and basically one single shot, and that's it for sexualised themes. That and the famous menstruation opening scene, which I must give Peirce credit for: it's been handled with far more sympathy and openness than in the first film, where there was, however buried underneath style and the baroque action, a tendril of "ew, gross, periods!"

So no hardcore feminist reimagining; what, then, justifies this Carrie? The answer, I am certain is nothing. Other than a few intolerably obvious suggestions about how life in the iPhone Age changes the nature of bullying (Carrie's tampon hell is uploaded to YouTube - oh, and 2007 called, it wanted its plot point back), the story isn't upgraded to 2013 convincingly, the characters aren't likeable or interesting, there's not a single scary beat in the entire thing, and the prom scene has been turned into an indistinguishable clone of a battle scene from just about any superhero movie. It's one thing for the movie to be weaker than the '76 Carrie; this goes deeper than that. There is absolutely nothing of value in this movie; it makes boring and arbitrary things that legitimately worked in at least two separate mediums already (three if you're the weirdo who likes the Carrie stage musical). It's a film where the unabashed highlight is Judy Greer as a thoughtful and sympathetic gym teacher, and all the love in the world to Ms. Greer, whose presence has enlivened so many things, but you don't want her to do all the heavy lifting for your movie. Ever.

Everything here is surface-level and unengaged with the characters or emotions; and those surfaces are already pretty bland and hackish and sanitary. Medicore and useless, I had expected of this Carrie; grating, soul-deadening insipidity I had not, and this is about as insipid as modern horror is able to be.

2/10

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TIM AT TFE: FOREIGN FILMS

This week's essay: Hopefully you're not too sick of CIFF stuff, because I have one more bit of it. Herein, I take a peak at all the films I saw that are submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and briefly consider their prospects as such.

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: ALAN PARTRIDGE: ALPHA PAPA (DECLAN LOWNEY, UK)

Screens at CIFF: 10/21
World premiere: 24 July, 2013, Norwich, UK

I have no idea if Alan Partridge, the buffoonish, vain media host played on radio, television, and now in a feature film by Steve Coogan, is well-loved in the United Kingdom or not. I know only that he's emphatically not well-loved in the United States, which sucks but isn't hugely surprising; you can count on one hand the number of British TV comedies that have been a really big deal on this side of the Atlantic. I actually have no idea how they do in Canada. I shouldn't have said that like I did.

The point being, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa is a film that will have a lot less resonance for Yanks than for other people, and that's a damn pity, because it's one of the funniest films of 2013. All things considered, only a very small amount of that humor comes from specific in-jokes, for that matter, though a certain familiarity with Partridge is something the movie... not takes for granted, I won't put it that way. It starts off by presenting Partridge as a known quantity and tries to get away without having to do the hard work of giving us a reason to want to spend time in his company. Though, to be fair, Alan Partridge is such a scabrous, selfish, reflexively insensitive and socially incompetent man that "want to spend time in his company" isn't really a consideration, anyway. Perhaps that's the hard work the movie skips over: letting us know in advance what kind of a miserable shit we're meant to spend the next 90 minutes with, and not giving us anything resembling a traditional movie protagonist with things like "sympathetic characteristics" (Alpha Papa does eventually find ways to give Partridge a traditional narrative arc and make him someone we can root for, though it manages to do this without having to soften him too much to start nicking away at the comedy).

How this would actually play to a non-fan or a newbie, I honestly can't say. For myself, I'd suppose that the comedy and satire are broad enough, and the target sufficiently universal (though the details are uniquely English), that anybody ought to be able to find it funny, and the only sticking point would be the somewhat unrelieved meanness of the humor, which is not merely of the contentious and difficult tradition of "cringe comedy" - Alan Partridge represents some of the earliest cringe comedy on record, and Armando Iannucci (the character's co-creator, and one of five credited writers on the feature) is perhaps its finest living practitioner.

But that's probably enough of that, and it's own to the movie itself. At the time the movie begins, Partridge is the midday DJ at a seemingly unfocused Norwich radio station, in the process of being purchased by a huge media conglomerate. With every intention of storming into the board meeting and passionately defending the traditions of local media and quirky, personalised expression, he ends up throwing another DJ under the bus to secure his own future; and this same ex-colleague, Pat Farrell (a terrifically pathetic and bleary-eyed Colm Meaney) is so distressed at losing the only thing that gave his life shape in the wake of his wife's death, he holds the newly rebranded studio's launch party hostage, with Partridge just barely managing to escape and then managing to act as go-between for the police, given that Farrell remains quite sure that he has a true friend in the utterly venal Partridge, having not yet noticed the massive "JUST SACK PAT" scrawled on a pad in the board room.

There's a lot of biting commentary on the edges (the film makes an impressively thorough argument against corporate ownership of local media, especially given how far down its list of priorities this theme is). For the most part, though, the satirical target is exactly what it's always been, and it's not exactly subtle: it's a broadside against the self-aggrandizement inherent to deciding that you're someone awesome enough that you should have a public forum to express your opinions in front of other people, and the self-promotion that allows fairly awful, untalented people to rise to the top. Alan Partridge might be fun to watch, and compared to at least some of the characters in the movie, he's not even all that unpleasant, but he's nothing if not an epic basatard. And by allowing him to express his bastardy in ever-deeper ways, the film works terrifically as an attack on celebrity, on fame, on ambition that comes at the cost of people.

An easy target, sure, but what makes Alpha Papa work is that it's consistently hilarious: that's in the eye of the beholder, of course, but Coogan has had a lot of time to perfect his timing in this role, and there are some truly amazing beats when the gap between Alan Partridge's actions and Alan Partridge's brain is just long enough for Alan Partridge to get in trouble (there's a physical gag parody Nazis - and more to the point, Coogan's immediate attempt to roll back on it - that's as funny as anything I've seen in a couple of years). The dialogue is sharp - a particular favorite is the broadcasting admonition "Never make fun of Islam. Only Christianity. And Jews, a little bit" - and the cast jumps into the situation and their characters with both feet. Th ending drags a bit, as the film's action-comedy balance starts to lurch towards action, or at least away from comedy, and watching Partridge being punctured over 90 minutes is less heady than watching it for 30 minutes, but all told, this is quick-footed, unflinching comedy that doesn't slow down or let up for quite a long time, and goes to some wonderfully unexpected places along the way. Mostly, it's funny, not terribly smart or notably well made - but it is very funny, and for that I am grateful.

8/10

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MASTERS OF ITALIAN HORROR: DARIO ARGENTO SUCKS IN EVERY DIRECTION

October's such a busy month: here I am, looking to pack away the Chicago International Film Festival and get to work on Kevin Olson's Italian Horror Blogathon, and wouldn't you know it, but I was given an absolutely perfect, gift-wrapped transition from one to the other in the form of Dracula 3D, the latest film from the most famous of all Italian horror directors, Dario Argento. This fits in even better, given that my intended them for this year's blogathon has been to tour the work of the leading lights of Italian horror, and put off scrounging for something obscure till next year as I picked one highly representative film for each of the genre's Big 3, and a couple of other key figures who aren't necessarily named in the same breath as Argento, Bava, and Fulci.

I do feel a little bad that my Argento pick turns out to be something as wholly awful as Dracula 3D, though not nearly as bad as I do that Argento has been cranking out wholly awful movies for so long that I can look at the terrible acting, stupid camera angles, dubious CGI, and deeply uncomfortable nude shots of Asia Argento, and without raising an eyebrow or blinking, say to myself, "yep, that is absolutely representative of fully half of the directorial output of the creator of Deep Red and Suspiria". It is possible, I suspect, that Dracula 3D is even his worst film; I haven't seen every last one of his late-period failures of both critical acclaim and fanboy enthusiasm, but I can't imagine that any of them have a moment as ill-conceived and shamefully executed as the one where Count Dracula (Thomas Kretschmann) turns into a man-sized praying mantis with fangs to kill a villager in his home. Though at least the uniformly poor CGI in the film doesn't seem as out-of-place in the case of the mantis, which already feels like a cannon-fodder monster in a late-'90s survival horror video game.

So, besides jaw-dropping CGI insects, whatever does Dracula 3D add to the decades-long corpus of Dracula adaptations? Argento himself would say that 3-D is itself the only answer that question needs, though for myself, I only noticed two scenes in which the technology was used to do anything remotely interesting, and one of those was the credits sequence (the camera veering through the narrow streets of a 19th Century Eastern European village - it's actually pretty great, certainly the most visually involving part of the movie). The other was a gore-heavy scene that manages to suggest, in the loosest way, what graphic, picturesque horror translated into multiple dimensions could consist of, though even as a purveyor of messy gore, Argento isn't up to his old self, and while the big bloodletting sequence (the only one in the film to speak of) is certainly an exuberantly nasty mess, but it's not a particularly imaginative one (eye-gouging on loan from Fulci, quick editing to make everything seem more shocking), nor even gross enough to cheat its way into being over-the-top disturbing.

Otherwise, it's just another damn Dracula, largely abandoning Bram Stoker's novel (though it includes the moment when the count skitters up the exterior wall of his castle at night, a scene that doesn't make it into nearly enough adaptations), and significantly re-working character identities. The short version: Jonathan Harker (Unax Ugalde) and his new wife Mina (Marta Gastini) are returning the village of her birth, where Jonathan has recently snagged a job as librarian to the eccentric count. He arrives several days before here, gets the customary hushed resistance from the locals, receives a jovial account of the local superstition from Mayor Kisslinger (Augusto Zucchi), and his daughter Lucy (Asia Argento), Mina's best friend, and heads off the castle where he receives a most awkward dinner. In short order, the count and his newest bride (Miriam Giovanelli) have reduced Jonathan to a near-catatonic state, Mina has arrived to wonder where her husband is, and Lucy has begun acting very strangely, sporting a distinctive pair of holes on the back of her knee (a nice touch, the vampire knowing that people are onto his usual tricks).

Not that Lucy acting strangely is all that easy to suss out, what with Argento fille giving one of her all-time worst performances in a dazed, head-lolling stupor that distinguishes between "pre-vampiric" and "hemi-vampiric" primarily in her willingness to, yet again, perform nude scenes in a movie directed by her father, one of those things that I am undoubtedly supposed to be accustomed to by now, but likely never shall be. Argento is the easy worst in show, and that's impressive considering the uniformly ineffective acting on display: Gastini has the hardest time handling the English language, and it takes up virtually all of her available energy; Ugalde is so visually anachronistic and disinterested in anything he has to do at any point that he very nearly makes Keanu Reeves look respectable. Lording over them all, Kretschmann's Dracula is a titanic and complete failure, not sexy enough to be dangerously alluring, not animalistic enough to be a legitimate threat, not suave enough to reek with Old World charms. He is the baked white potato, hold the butter, of screen vampires. There is a physical object there - the 3-D confirms it - but no personality, no soul, not even a vivid soullessness. The only thing that redeems the human element at all is Rutger Hauer's perfectly-pitched Van Helsing (a psychiatrist and paranormal specialist in this iteration), projecting just the right amount of "what the fuck did I get myself into?" bemusement and hammy without going full-bore Edward Van Sloan or Anthony Hopkins and turning the movie into a flood of overwrought theatrics. It is a terrible version of the character, but the right one for this film, introduced just at the exact point where it helps turn the tide from "this is so awful" to "this is so awful, but at least it's kind of funny".

So much for the human element. The arch visual stylist who gave the world all those masterpieces is nowhere in evidence, but there's at least an overriding sensibility to Dracula 3D that gives it the feeling of discipline, even if it's not very interesting. Basically, it wants to be a full-color, high-tech, blood-fueled version of a Universal film, as far as I can tell: Luciano Tovoli's cinematography and Claudio Cosentino's sets both tap into a vividly old-school ethos of making things good and atmospheric, even if they end up looking unabashedly stagebound along the way, and for all that the staging of scenes is usually dreadful - the most interesting blocking happens in the opening, during one of the most physically unconvincing sex scenes in many days - if you can take the time to look behind the clumsily-posed actors, the cheery artifice of the locations tends to give the film at least some kind of sense of fun. Certainly, the score by Goblin keyboardist Claudio Simonetti (Argento's long-time composer), probably the only thing about the movie that actively works, contributes immeasurably to the sense that we're watching something proud to be old-fashioned, with all the bangs and creaks of a child's Halloween fantasies.

Still, "it feels like an 80-year-old movie with blood and Asia Argento's boobs" is, at a minimum, not what we want from the great maestro, and the whole thing is a deadly combination of laziness, incompetence, and disinterest. It manages, barely, to be stupid enough at enough points to be fun to watch beyond the retro-chic aesthetic, but even then the line separating a CGI mantis that is funny from a CGI mantis that I forgot about because I immediately started guzzling alcohol to block out the pain is a thin line, and porous. Really, the fact that I'm having a debate with myself in print as to whether Dracula 3D is dopey enough to be fun says it all. We are a long way from visual ingenuity and a real sense of macabre possibility here, and the spectacle promised by the phrase "Dario Argento in 3-D!" is as impossible to find here as decent acting or an original narrative beat.

3/10

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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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