‘Seems I’ve spent the better part of my life amongst the dead...’
The thing with Frankenstein, Dracula and The Invisible Man is that they’re based on classic literature, so they are, in theory, easy to adapt (which is why there are so many iterations of each). The Mummy was created by writers Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer for Universal in the 1930s. With no source material to draw from, no lore or mythology, there isn’t enough to make the story of a guy wandering around with bandages on compelling. For my money, and I haven’t seen Lee Cronin’s latest take on it, there hasn’t been a great film made out of this concept yet. The Brendan Fraser vehicle is closest, but even that feels like a poor man’s Indiana Jones with a mummy thrown in. As with pretty much all of the Universal monsters, Hammer had a crack at creating their own version of The Mummy, but unlike their adaptation of Dracula and Frankenstein, this one is both inferior to its Universal counterpart (itself not that great), and a pretty average film generally…
Directed by Hammer mainstay Terence Fisher and starring Peter Cushing as archaeologist John Banning, and Christopher Lee as the eponymous mummy, there should be enough talent involved here to make this thing worthwhile. Alas, that is not the case.
Despite having a much bigger budget than Hammer’s previous Universal adaptations, The Mummy doesn’t look anywhere near as good. When tasked with producing something other than a haunted castle or an English stately home, the set design here just ends up looking cheap and artificial. Cushing, an actor who always offers something, is given very little to do here, with much of the dialogue either mundanely expository or totally forgettable. The flashback scenes in Ancient Egypt are also fairly dull, and the film lacks the kind of visual set piece that Hammer had become known for by this point. In fact, the highlight of the film for me was seeing a poster for the Bass Brewery in one of the pub scenes, which perhaps points to how few memorable moments The Mummy contains.
Any film starring Lee and Cushing can’t be all bad, and there are some enjoyable moments along the way, but this iteration of The Mummy is yet more proof that this story just isn’t that interesting.
