Mummy's Tomb, The (1942)

Director: Harold Young
Notable Cast: Lon Chaney, Jr., Dick Foran, John Hubbard, Elyse Knox, George Zucco, Wallace Ford, Turhan Bey

Our "epic" story of the mummy Kharis continues and in case you didn't see the previous film "The Mummy's Hand", we are "graced" with 15 minutes of flashback footage sloppily edited at the beginning of the film to help "remind" (meaning "pad time") the audience. That means we only have about 45 minutes of new footage! That's real cheap of you Universal!

Mummy's Hand, The (1940)

Director: Christy Cabanne
Notable Cast: Dick Foran, Peggy Moran, Wallace Ford, Eduardo Ciannelli, George Zucco, Cecil Kellaway, Charles Trowbridge, Tom Tyler

With their other monster franchises going strong, Universal decided to resurrect a long dead monster right before the outbreak of World War II. This monster is of course The Mummy, perhaps the most overlooked of all the Universal monsters. This sequel to the 1932 classic starring Boris Karloff doesn't feature the same cloth wrapped foe Im-Ho-Tep. This time we get a mummy named Kharis in the form of Western legend Tom Tyler and a whole new story line would start for a total of four films.

The film opens with plenty of stock footage from the original Mummy, showing the story of Kharis and his forbidden love for a princess. Like the original he gets caught and is buried alive. Cut to 1940 and we are introduced to two struggling archeologists who buy a broken vase because it has an inscription about the tomb of a Princess Ananka. They seek financial support from a wealthy magician and his daughter and head out to the desert only to find the tomb of Kharis, who becomes resurrected with the aid of a solution of Tana leaves to get revenge.

Mummy, The (1932)

Director: Karl Freund
Notable Cast: Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, David Manners, Arthur Bryon, Edward Van Sloan

When someone says "Universal Monsters" people usually think of Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man...and the Mummy. The Mummy always seems to be the last on the list. For the most part I think many people find this film to be the least of the aforementioned films. I as a child also found The Mummy to be my least favorite of the four. Re-watching it again as an adult with an adult perspective I can still honestly say that it is still my least favorite of the major four films. This however doesn't mean I dislike the film just less than the others.

The film opens with an impressive Egyptian model for the title sequence and then the audience is thrown into Egypt in which a dig is being conducted on a mummy's tomb. When a sacred box is opened our Mummy awakens. After a very short sequence of the mummy in his bandaged form, he returns on screen as the more human looking Boris Karloff who is searching for the reincarnated soul of his long lost love.