The Mummy's Curse (1944)

Too much of everything

Memorable, crazy movie

Don't Believe the Hype

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I keep reading complaints how the shift from New England to Louisiana is unexplained. It isn't. In the opening bits where the archaeologist talks with the authorities he tells how the priests moved the mummy to Louisiana 25 years ago. (It was perhaps the synopsis of an unfilmed sequel.) Anyhow the dialogue fully explains the shift in location and one needs only to listen to find out. Oh and Virginia Christine is absolutely gorgeous. I only wish they had given her more screen time.Also, Classicsoncall in his review says "We're signaled to the emergence of the Kharis legend by the first appearance of a dead body, but has anyone noticed that the laborer Antoine died with a knife in his back? Kharis always did his dirty work with his left hand, leaving bandage mold behind on the neck of his victims." This too is inaccurate. It was the priest's assistant who killed Antoine after they dug Kharis up. Again it's clearly stated in the dialogue. It's fine and dandy to criticize a movie for its shortcomings but the criticisms should be accurate. Stuff like that can turn off a potential viewer. If you're not going to pay attention to the dialogue then you really have no business submitting an inaccurate review.

For some reason, Mummies are being buried in the swamps of Louisiana. I don't know how people know this, but, sure enough, some excavation digs them up. And, once again, some idiot feels he has to brew those Tanna leaves. Mummies are interesting horror figures. The one quality they seem to have is that they only move at about a half a mile and hour, and yet people stop and let themselves be strangled. Lon Chaney, Jr. is the star here. I need to go back and see some of the other mummy movies after the first Karloff one. This is standard fare with very little new. But it does have that Louisiana atmosphere and it's certainly fun to see these things. Not great art, but no one said it would be.

This movie is a hackneyed, cheap, rushed dog of a production. What in heaven's name are the Mummy and his princess doing wandering around Louisiana? Ridiculous. I am sorry but the fake Cajun accents are such a mismatch with ancient Egyptian stories this is just almost a non-movie. Louisiana and Egypt are both done a disservice here.The script was shoehorned into the Louisiana locale and so is also just a total mess.But the cast is good. Zucco is fantastic in his small role. Holmes Herbert is solid in his role as the doctor, Carradine is perfect and does a good job. Virginia Christine brings off her role in a sincere, fascinating and watchable way, and gives us a new and improved take on the princess. Kay Harding is fine as the darling ingénue daughter of a tough foreman. I like to hear Ms. Harding speak with her unaffected soft voice and kind persona.Ridiculous hack ideas are behind the concept of everything that takes place in this whole film. The lumbering, sad mummy is totally out of place (no tomb, no museum, no Egypt, etc.), as he wanders around the Louisiana countryside. The unwatchable ideas just keep coming so the film becomes curiously watchable to see how bad can it get, and is saved by the effective cast.

An irrigation project in the rural bayous of Louisiana unearths Kharis the living mummy (Lon Chaney Jr.), who was buried in quicksand 25 years earlier.Apparently, if you do the math, this film is set in 1997. I have not independently verified this, but presume it to be true. What I find amusing about that is not how wrong they were about 53 years in the future, but how right. Aside from certain minor aspects (the hairstyles and the second-class status of women and minorities) the 1990s were not all that different from the 1940s. If you look at most films set twenty (not even fifty) years in the future, they make such outrageous predictions and are almost always wrong.I liked the humor of this film. Whether intentional or not, the people of Louisiana depicted here were great. Sure, they were caricatures and possibly stereotypes. Maybe that makes me a bad person that I found them amusing, but I did. Universal and the 1940s... such an interesting era, it really makes you miss Universal in the 1930s.