The Mummy's Tomb

Spends 10 out of 60 mins in flashbacks to the last film, which I liked since I'd already forgotten it. W/ 50 mins left, this moves very fast & then some dopiness comes in, which fans may hate but made me grin: the lead ecstatic at marriage & new job despite having just confirmed there's a killer mummy after his family; a torch-wielding mob that's ready to go to town on an Egyptian just b/c mummies come from Egypt; & a mummy w/ a bum arm & leg that still climbs trellises (while carrying a woman).

Poor Lon 'Don't call me junior' Chaney stuck acting emotionless mummy. I really like him in The Wolf Man, sadly his acting talent never was fully used later on. Mummy Kharis seems the least dangerous of Universal monsters - he is half paralyzed, he can't run or think for himself, and yet he manages to get everyone with his one hand strangulation. Romantic subplot looks really forced. Running time is only ~60min and 10min of that is flashback scenes from previous film. You call that a movie?

After a necessary flashback (I saw The Mummy's Hand a week earlier and even I couldn't remember a damn thing), it does a pretty interesting thing. It's like a southern gothic mummy story. It doesn't last, though. It goes right to the old guard of kidnapping a woman to turn into a mummy, coupled with the Frankenstein torch-wielding mob bit.

Apparently 25 to 30 years have elapsed since the previous film, The Mummy's Hand. That would place The Mummy's Tomb somewhere in the late '60s or early '70s, yet America looks just like it did in the 1940s. How extremely odd.

lol

"I know, let's set a mummy movie in a cemetery in the South!" And you know what? It works surprisingly well. The Gothic atmosphere always works wonders in the South, and transplanting the otherworldly Egyptian horror there gives it a nice flavor. Unfortunately the first 15 minutes are devoted to recapping the preceding film, an unreasonable amount of screen time. Overall a good effort, good enough for the basis of the Hammer reboot even.

Short but not that interesting. I'm not really into this franchise. The mummy is neither scary nor well used here.

A movie that's only 61 minutes long should probably contain LESS than 11 minutes of reused footage.

Grim sequel to The Mummy's Hand has all the members of the original Kharis expedition killed off as the mummy (now played by Lon Chaney) is transplanted to America. Change of locale and atmospheric photography make this worth watching, but the flashbacks grow ever longer and more tedious.

Passes the time.

The Mummy's Tomb (1942) is perhaps not a great classic horror movie, but it has it's appeal. Especially in a year where most horror pictures where spoofs and comedies, this one was out to scare. Unrecognizable Lon Chaney Jr. looking like a real monster. The story is done a little too much on the budget, but the make-up and all that was impressive.