The Mummy's Curse (1944)

The Mummy's Curse (1944)

So, it looks like my timeline from The Mummy's Ghost (1940) was a bit off.

According to that one, the events from The Mummy (1932) happened 30 years earlier, which would place them in 1914; but, according to this one, this takes place 25 years later, which pushes the original The Mummy event all the way back to 1889.

The story, as it is related, has also changed over time, (which only makes sense); and not only that, but it is also actually starting to meet with a healthier dose of skepticism. Sure, living mummies might be real, but that doesn't mean we have to believe in them.

Aside from the skepticism, it turns out the basic living mummy component is true, despite the details having changed over time.

In this chapter, two new Egyptian agents have come to America to reclaim their mummy heritage long lost deep inside a currently-being-drained swamp.

As the movie starts one of the mummies has been found and unearthed by one of the agents, (who has also committed a murder in the process.)

The other mummy wakes up on its own in a beautifully weird and unsettling scene which starts with a single hand rising from below the earth. The hand looks suspiciously like a rough-looking male hand, but it is soon cleared up that it's actually a female form which is awakening from its 25 year-long mud bath.

The mud bath has had a curative effect on princess Amina (no longer Ananka) as, upon cleaning up, her hair has turned jet black again, and her skin is as youthful as it was twenty five years ago, (not that this broad would look terrible, even if she was in her forties.)

Maybe the mud is a natural source of Vita-Amina-Vege-Min?

She is taken into custody with tragedy following her, as Kharis, the male companion mummy has been given tana juice by the two Egyptian agents and is already close behind her.

The movie is conveniently set in Cajun country, and their gypsy-like culture is a haven for superstition, (how soon we forget that in the earlier chapter we had had Western University professors teaching that very same superstition as respectable 'science'.)

While these discrepancies might realistically make sense, (25 years is a long time and attitudes might well have changed over the years,) for them to appear in two films which were released in close proximity remains notable.

The film's plot is a virtual reprise of the previous chapter but where the Amina character barely addressed her two conflicting (contemporary & ancient) souls, at least here she does, not that at a lean 60 minutes there is barely room for any other neat characterization aspects to be present.

If virtually all other elements are the same, and the other film was 'the John Carradine' one then, this one is the one 'with the creepy, female, living mummy'?

How am I to remember, otherwise?

Features a segment with an early version of 'The Hook-Handed Killer.'