The Mummy's Hand Review

Tied for Number Seven on my Top Ten Classic Horror Movies is 1940's The Mummy's Hand, directed by Christy Cabanne, which was released eight years after the original Boris Karloff Mummy. The film takes the original premise and runs with it, adding a few new twists and a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek humor.

The film was a hit, and led to three more sequels, The Mummy's Tomb ( which featured most of the same actors, and recycled nine minutes of footage from The Mummy's Hand), The Mummy's Ghost, and The Mummy's Curse, which milked the formula further, and featured Lon Chaney Jr. as Kharis, the Mummy, who is portrayed in this movie by cowboy actor Tom Tyler. Also in the cast are Dick Foran, Peggy Moran, Wallace Ford, Cecil Kellaway, and Eduardo Ciannelli. George Zucco plays the high priest of Karnak, a really nasty dude who is kind of the Baron Frankenstein of Egypt. In other words, the kind of guy who brings a dead guy back to life to do his evil bidding. Unlike the Frankenstein monster, who was only recently deceased, the Mummy's been dead a long, long time, and he's none too pleased about being back among the living. He's got a bad, bad attitude and you can bet he's got some bad breath as well.

The basic plot concerns a couple of down-on-their-luck archaeologists from Brooklyn (Foran and Ford, sort of the poor man's Hope and Crosby), who desecrate the tomb of the Egyptian princess Annanka, thus incurring the wrath of Karnak, who brings the Mummy back to life to exact revenge on them.

Like many of the Universal monster movies, this one was later remade in color by England's Hammer Films, in 1959, with Christopher Lee in the title role. And it was The Mummy's Hand, rather than the 1932 original, that inspired 1999's The Mummy with Brendan Fraser, which used the same comination of supernatural horror and knockabout comedy. That one made more money at the box office than all the previous Mummies combined, but that's inflation for you. For my money, I'll take this movie any day. Instead of expensive computer-generated images, the special effects man on The Mummy's Hand had to do things old school. In this film, the Mummy's eyes are completely black. This effect was achieved not with expensive CGI, but with a magic marker, frame by frame. Now that's good old-fashioned American ingenuity. And much cheaper, too.

Available on DVD as a two-fer with The Mummy's Tomb, and as part of The Mummy: The Legacy Collection from Universal Home Entertainment.