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The Mummy’s Curse (1944)

Dir: Leslie Goodwins

Mr. Walsh (Addison Richards) is the boss of an excavation company that is draining a nearby swamp and an archaeologist, Dr. Halsey, (Dennis Moore) wants to use this opportunity to search for the legendary Mummy of Kharis and his reincarnated doomed love Ananka, who both sank into the swamp years ago.

Unbeknownst to Dr. Halsey though his assistant Dr. Ilzor Zandaab (Peter Coe) is actually an Egyptian High Priest who, with the sacred tana leaves, revives Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.).
This event then triggers the revival, and seeming return to humanity, of the unfortunate Amina, who is the reincarnation of Princes Ananka (Virginia Christine) .

And so, for the last time, Kharis murderously searches out his lost love so they can share eternity together…..

Well, we finally got here. The end of the ‘Universal’ Kharis films that started with “The Mummy’s Hand” in 1940.
And sadly this is a case of a film too far, as “Curse” is a rather tired, rather pointless, sequel to a story that ended in a perfectly fine (and nicely unexpected) way in the superior “The Mummy’s Ghost”.

Things don’t get off to a good start with the opening scene featuring a singing tavern wench (who looks like a moonlighting middle aged housewife) who for a minute or so shovels more aural muck in our ears than even Kharis has in his after being in that damn swamp all these years.
And from that scene we move to a really bizarre, needlessly continuity damaging, move of locale for said swamp from a middle class lady filled New England, of the previous films, to a superstitious Cajun filled Louisiana!
Seems it’s not only Kharis who mysteriously gets up and walks. The entire friggin swamp has too!

We also sadly, after being ditched in the previous film “The Mummy’s Ghost”, have the Kharis legend re-told to us yet again. Meaning we have to sit through that damn recycled footage again from Karloff’s “The Mummy” along with its altered footage from “The Mummy’s Hand”.
Which means we now see Tom Tyler play Kharis again, despite Lon Chaney playing Kharis again! My brain hurts!

Despite his dislike of the role by this time Chaney does okay again as Kharis and throttles those that he deems worthy of throttling with great skill. Kharis seems to have got even slower though, seems the years of strife are indeed beginning to tell on him!
Martin Kosleck as Zandaab ‘s sinister German helper is quite fun too and his endless “Yes master” ejaculations are an Igoritus gem.

Everyone else is pretty non-descript accept for one case, and it’s not for a good reason.
So the less said about Napoleon Simpson’s weirdly monikered 'Goobie' the better, as he’s a great example of dubious Hollywood portrayals of Black characters as he spends much of the film saying stuff like “Yesum masser, I done saw him go thatta way” rather a lot.
Indeed much of the dialogue is delightfully bad like this gem from a doomed night watchmen of a ruined church;
“In the basement of the chapel I found the bodies of newly murdered men! Never has this happened before”!
Well, that’s nice to know!

But it’s not all negatives.
“Curse” famously features one of the best moments in the entire series when Ananka comes back to life.
Her ‘rising up’ scene is pretty damn effective with some excellent physical acting by Virginia Christine as Ananka painfully stretches her mummified limbs before slowly standing up and staggering away with her closed, dirt covered eyes, straining towards the unseen sun.
Here we go into the realms of hazy plotting though. I was never really sure why Amina changed into a mummified version of Ananka in “The Mummy’s Ghost” and I have no idea how she changes back here (after a quick wash in a pool) and seems to now be a living human again, despite changing into a mummy and lying at the bottom of a swamp for years.
Action is pretty good but is really just the exact same shuffling up to the victims and one hand throttling them, mostly out of frame, we have now seen in three other films.

But at least Kharis seem to do a lot of killing here with various unfortunates, who fail to simply run away, succumbing to Kharis’ fatal grip.
There’s a scene here though that lacks the entertainment value it could have had, when a Cajun shoots Kharis at point blank range with a shotgun and nothing happens at all.
It’s a classic example of why the ‘Hammer’ version of "The Mummy" was so much better when they did comparative scenes and we got to see big holes blown in Kharis to great effect.
After all, despite being of supernatural origin, Kharis is still a normal physical being.

Perhaps it was because this was now the forth Kharis film I’ve watched in the past couple of weeks, but I was getting a serious, and rather sense-dulling, case of deja-vu here.
Even the pretty fast pace, that once again got down to the mummy action quite quickly, failed to drive me out of this rather lethargic state as pretty much the same plot, with a few tweaks, played out once again (including yet another ’came out of nowhere’ bit of , evil plot destroying, falling in love from one of the bad guys) until we get to a very weak finale that, after the excellent fiery peril of “Tomb” and the surprisingly dark tragedy of “Ghost” is a real damp squib to end the entire Kharis cycle on as it simply involves a few cardboard stones falling down.

So not a very good film in general, and a very poor way to end the series.
It’s watchable enough but quite frankly if you do go through the Kharis story arc…you should just end it at “The Mummy’s Ghost”.