12:40PM, Oct 23, 2008
With Brendan Fraser stepping out as intrepid explorer Rick O’Connell in the third instalment of the Mummy series, we look back at eighty years of spin-tinglers featuring bandaged bogeymen. From Boris Karloff as Imhotep to comedy horror of Bubba Ho-Tep, the Mummy film has become a whole, new sub-genre…
Basically, as far as movies are concerned, mummies are little more than an Egyptian zombie wrapped in several yards of bandage.
Yet the classic story of an ancient priest awoken together with a terrible curse has terrified both cinema audiences emerging from the Great Depression to those looking forward to the New Millennium.
Although previous films had dealt with the subject, the first acknowledged mummy movie was 1932’s The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff as the revived priest who heads off to Cairo to find the soul of his ancient lover.
In 1999, director Stephen Sommers lifted the same story but replaced the all-British team of archaeologists by adventurers led by American Rick O’Donnell and played by Brendan Fraser.
The Oscar-nominated movie, which also starred Rachel Weisz and John Hannah, was box office gold
and made more than $400m worldwide.
The 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb by archaeologist Howard Carter with its tales of bad luck and curses is regardarded as supplying the spark for Karloff’s first outing in 1932.
“If the Mummy movies have a theme it is the quest for life after death and the idea in Western culture that if you meddle with that - the natural processes - bad things are going to happen,” says Rob Cohen, director of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.
Mummy movies hit on something very deep. I consider it sort of the off-page form of Christianity - the dark side of the idea that 'only through me will you gain eternal life.' "
Yet it still could be played for laughs. In 1939, slapstick comedy trio the Three Stooges humorously exploited the discovery of Tutankhamen in the short film We Want Our Mummy, in which they explored the tomb of the midget King Rutentuten (and his Queen, Hotsy Totsy).
(A decade later, they were crooked used chariot salesmen in Mummy's Dummies, in which they ultimately assist a different King Rootentootin (Vernon Dent) with a toothache.
On a more serious note, after Karloff, Ton Tyler donned a swathe of grubby bandages for the 1942 outing The Mummy’s Hand. His mouth and hands were “blacked out” after filming to give a more disturbing look.
He was followed by the celebrated Lon Chaney J in a direct sequel to The Mummy’s Hand. It took make-up artists nine hours to wrap Chaney Jr, whose character was now known as Kharis
Despite voicing dislike of the character, Chaney Jr was back for the 1944 sequel The Mummy’s Ghost and also stayed on board for The Mummy’s Curse the same year.
(The famous sequence in which Princess Ananka (Virginia Christine) rises from the dead in the swamp is slightly “under cranked” - a process that speeds up the action - lending an eerie, unreal quality to her movements).
Scares were swapped for laughs in 1955 when Abbott and Costello spoofed the earlier movies in Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, which boasted the tagline It Has Been Said That A Man’s Best Friend Is His Mummy.
Four years later – rather unsurprisingly – Hammer clambered aboard the bandwagon with Peter Cushing as professor John Banning and Christopher Lee as Kharis the Mummy.
(In a Hollywood deal Hammer's executives had their pick of Universal Studio’s horror icons and chose to remake The Invisible Man, The Phantom of the Opera and The Mummy's Hand.)
Further "mummy" movies were unrelated to the 1959 remake and 1967’s The Mummy’s Shroud – 
feature Lee’s stuntman double as the mummy - was relegated to second feature status.
In 1971, Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb featured Bond girl Valerie Leon who played a professor’s daughter who is possessed by the spirit of an evil Egyptian princess.
(Leon, a former fashion buyer for Harrods, was best remembered for her part as a tall buxom woman driven wild by a small and puny man wearing Hai Karate aftershave in a series of commercials.)
Ten years later high campery was the order of the day when a group of fashion models disturb the tomb of a mummy and revive an ancient curse in 1981’s Dawn of the Mummy.
Tony Curtis certainly didn’t repeat the magic of Some Like It Hot when he played a mummy who returns from the dead and becomes obsessed with a woman he thinks is the reincarnation of his dead lover in 1993’s The Mummy Lives.
In 1997, the appalling Legend of the Mummy – based on Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of the Seven Stars - starred Louis Gossett Jr as a tomb raider who is hired to return a reanimated Queen Tera to eternal rest.
Things went right for the mummy move in 1999 when Sommers returned to the 1932 original for inspiration and coupled a witty script to cutting edge special effects.
He would successfully repeat the formula for 2001’s The Mummy Returns which also introduced cinema audiences to Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock, who played The Scorpion King.
In 2008, director Rob Cohen took over the reins for the third instalment - The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor - with Fraser and Hannah back for more action, this time against Jet Li’s shape-shifting Emperor Han.
Tim Evans
