Director: Gerry O'Hara
Cast: Tony Curtis, Leslie Hardy, Greg Wrangler

It probably goes as no surprise after publishing 1000 movies for this web site, but just in case, I will freely admit it right here and now - I find movies to be a lot of fun. All kinds of movies, from actioners to serious art dramas. I like to watch movies in part because they can stimulate my imagination, and make me wonder what life would be like for me if I were in the situation of the characters. This isn't limited to just serious movies, but also fantasy and horror movies. Whenever I watch a movie about monsters, while I am being entertained by the movie, I further entertain myself by thinking of what life would be like for me if I were that monster. More often than not, I realize that a life of monsterhood would suck to the extreme. For example, let's consider the biggest monsters of them all. I'm talking about King Kong, Godzilla, and other cinematic monsters as big as (or even bigger than) multi-story buildings. Sure, at first glance it might seem cool to be taller than any other creatures at your feet and giving them a lot of fear and anxiety. But when you think about it more, life would soon start to suck. Sure, you would be bigger than human beings, but humans have the ability to make various kinds of deadly weapons, and they would probably be using them on you. Second, think about all the calories you would have to eat every day in order to stay energetic and healthy. How the heck did King Kong manage every day to find enough food on Skull Island? Lastly there is the fact that being such a gigantic size, your bone structure wouldn't be strong enough to hold your mass, and you would instantly fall down and stay down once your leg bone snapped from all of your weight.

But since such large monsters are only a small fraction of the total number of monsters, I tend to think of the lives of much smaller monsters. And it seems for most of them, having their lives wouldn't be such a good thing. The life of Dracula - or any other vampire for that matter - would suck (ahem) to the extreme. Sure, you could turn into a bat or other animals, and you would have various other powers that would make you a deadly foe. But the cons of being a vampire outweigh the pros. I'll put aside the fact you would be vulnerable to stakes in the heart, since when you think about it, regular humans are vulnerable to that as well. Anyway... first of all, you would have to ingest nothing but blood all of the time in order to keep up your strength. How anyone can stand the taste of blood night after night is beyond me. Second, you would only be able to go out at night, since sunlight would kill you. Worst of all, it's highly likely that you would also have the curse of having arithmomania, which is what the famous vampire Count von Count has. However, as bad as it would be to be a vampire, I think it would suck even more to be a mummy. Think back what you have learned about mummies from movies and television shows over the years. During the process of mummification, your guts and your brain would be removed, so subsequently you would not only feel a hollow sensation in your belly, you would be extremely stupid. You would also be confined with bandages, so woe be on you if you feel claustrophobic. There is also the fact that mummies move around v-e-r-y slowly... though for some strange reason, when it comes to fiction movies, they always seem to quickly catch up with victims trying to flee from them.

There are other aspects of mummies that, while not necessarily making the life of being one a hardship, do make some impact. There is the fact that mummies have bandaged faces, masking their true features that must look hideous after thousands of years of rot and wear. I think this fact is  the prime reasons why mummies, unlike vampires and many other kinds of monsters, have not made as big an impact on the silver screen. To tell the truth, I personally find mummies in movies for the most part to be quite dull. There are exceptions, like the 1932 Boris Karloff-starring The Mummy, and the 1959 movie of the same name that had Christopher Lee in the role. But generally, I think filmmakers have problems giving this particular kind of monster enough interest. So you are probably wondering now why I would review a movie with the title The Mummy Lives. Several reasons, as it turns out. First, the movie was not only produced by the legendary schlockmeister Yoram Globus of Cannon Films fame, but it was also produced by the legendary schlockmeister Harry Alan Towers (who made Oddball Hall). Not only that, the star of the movie was the legendary Tony Curtis (Brainwaves). As I've often said on this web site, how could I resist? At the start of the movie, we meet an American woman named Sandra Barnes (Leslie Hardy, Sneakers), who has decided to travel the world after breaking up with her significant other. Her travels take her to Cairo, where shortly after her arrival, an archeological dig in the nearby Egyptian desert that is being sponsored by medial mogul Lord Maxton (Jack Cohen, Delta Force 3) uncovers an ancient tomb that carries the mummy of an ancient figure known as Aziru. Aziru had been entombed alive centuries earlier as a punishment for having a forbidden love affair with an esteemed woman named Kia. The uncovering of his tomb wakes his spirit, which is in his reincarnation, a man known as Dr. Mohassid (Tony Curtis). He feels that the spirit of his beloved Kia has been reincarnated as Sandra, so he sets out to reclaim her... killing anybody who gets in his way.

As I indicated earlier, I have seen my fair share of mummy movies over the years, so much so that I've noticed they have something in common with slasher movies - namely that they like to repeat the same elements. In The Mummy Lives, we have an ancient Egyptian high priest in love with the squeeze of his king and getting mummified alive for his trouble, more trouble starting in modern times when a tomb is opened up by archeologists, and the members of the archeological team being knocked off one by one, just some of the deja-vu elements to be found here. What makes this particularly bad is that there are no fresh angles to be found with this resurrected material; throughout you'll be thinking, "I've seen this exactly as before!" Well, come to think of it, maybe not as exactly, because every element is chained to each other with some of the dumbest and most unbelievable scripting you will have ever seen. Archeologists uncover and enter a tomb in just a few minutes, and after a few minutes more they have opened a sarcophagus and opened up the mummy inside of it. Later, security guards make no attempt to apprehend and arrest the archeologists when they break back into the tomb after the local government locked it up. When the mysterious Dr. Mohassid turns up, nobody questions his authority or how he always happens to appear in places where nobody saw him enter. Believe me, I could go on for some time about the movie's stupidity. Actually, the stupidity does add a little life with the real problem of the screenplay, which is how utterly boring it is. The movie is much too slow to advance in its plot, one example being that after Sandra lands in Egypt and goes to her hotel in the opening few minutes, we have to subsequently wait for more than twenty-five minutes for her to leave her hotel and start her trip to the tomb.

Although The Mummy Lives stretches out things way past the breaking point, there is a strong feeling that either footage is missing or was not filmed in the first place. That's because there's not only a considerable amount of narration, it's done by three different characters. Sandra narrates in the first few minutes to give background to her character, Dr. Mohassid narrates periodically concerning his evil schemes, and Sandra's eventual love interest Dr. Carey Williams (Greg Wrangler, O.C. And Stiggs) has at least a couple of times where he narrates at length. You may be thinking that all this sounds like the movie was a mess, and indeed it is. Director Gerry O'Hara (The Bitch) throughout finds new ways to astonish audiences on the movie's shoddy nature, including cheap and flimsy sets obviously constructed on soundstages, terrible continuity (a fist-sized hole in a wall becomes almost man-sized after cutting away for a second), obvious dubbing, and various technical goofs (look for the cameraman reflected on a pane of glass). But the worst mistake he makes with this movie is that it's not the least bit scary or horrific. There's hardly any blood or gore, for one thing. The supposed "horror" never has any energy or zip to it, with O'Hara and the players just going through the motions in a real bogged down fashion. One reason for this extremely fatigued feeling is that although the title of the movie suggests that there is a monster up front and center at least some time eventually, in actual fact we hardly get to see it at all. Instead of showing us a lot more of the mummy, the movie instead just follows Curtis' Dr. Mohassid character around scene after scene. It's explained that the character is the resurrection of the mummy, but the character in this form for the most part just goes around and around making cryptic or threatening statements to the other players. This is supposed to be horrifying? Or creepy? Or engaging?

I think that Tony Curtis was underrated as an actor; in the right role, he could be very effective, having, among other things, a great sarcastic sense of humor. However, in this role he doesn't seem to be the least bit enthusiastic. He seems to be a little bewildered by his surroundings at times, and sometimes has a voice that sounds quite hoarse, though it's seductive music compared to the inpenetrable accents some of the supporting actors spout out. For whatever reason (maybe sensing the low quality of the production and his character), Curtis has absolutely no energy, and doesn't give any of that amusing playfulness he put in other movies he appeared in. It's a terrible performance, though I am hard pressed to decide if it's a little better or a little worse than the performance of Leslie Hardy in the female lead role. Her performance is all over the map, and never in a particularly good manner. Her narration sounds so gee-whiz, made worse by the unbelievably flowery writing in these passages from every subject from pyramids to saying goodbye. When she is playing in flashbacks the forbidden lover of Curtis' character, she doesn't even bother to put on an accent, made worse that her limited dialogue here sounds like that from a 20th century American woman. Most of the time, however, she is just simply bland. Even when her character has intense nightmares or hallucinations, there is no personal spin to her reactions, just utterly standard screams instead. If we hadn't heard her narration at the beginning of the movie, we would have no sense of what kind of person she was. By now you should have a good idea as to why The Mummy Lives sat on a shelf after its completion in 1993 for several years in North America before it was quietly (and barely) dumped on VHS. And then in the mid '00s, it suddenly got a DVD release, meaning someone thought the movie was worth all that fuss and after all that time. The mind boggles.

(Posted August 21, 2024)