- You know, for something that calls itself The Mummy, there's a surprising shortage of mummy footage in this film. Sure, the opening ten minutes feature the discovery of Imhotep (Boris Karloff) and some proper bandaged menacing, but the rest of the film focuses on the Mummy's rather less terrifying alter ego, Ardath Bey, also played by Karloff. Don't get me wrong -- Bey is a creepy guy. He's really tall and the wrinkles in his face make him look a hundred years old, which I suppose is a gross underestimate of his true age. Nonetheless, the film accidentally illustrates the immense difference between being threatened by Boris Karloff and being threatened by Boris Karloff in a great costume.
- The basic story is probably identical to every other mummy movie ever made. The archaeologist Sir Joseph Whemple (Arthur Byron) finds a mummy or two and realizes all too late that he should have taken the associated mummy's curse much more seriously. In this case, the curse was intended to prevent Imhotep from rising and resurrecting his lost love, Ankh-es-en-amon (Zita Johann), who bears a striking resemblance to a local woman named Helen, also played by Johann. It's never made terribly clear how or why Ankh-es-en-amon's spirit has inhabited Helen, but rest assured that it makes life plenty confusing for Helen and her love interest, Frank (David Manners), who happens also to be both Sir Joseph's son and the lead archaeologist in charge of excavating Ankh-es-en-amon's tomb.
- With his hypnotic eyes, mystical powers, and Karloff's blocky countenance, Bey comes across as a strange amalgam of Universal's two most famous movie monsters. Unfortunately, the film he's in lacks the wonderful sets or diabolical villain of Tod Browning's Dracula and is decidedly less tragic or exciting than James Whale's Frankenstein. It's not clear that the fault lies entirely with director Karl Freund, whose cinematographic work in Metropolis and Dracula would seem to have made him perfectly qualified for this job. Instead, the problem may simply be that a mummy movie without much mummy can only get you so far. If there's not a guy in bandages chasing people around every few minutes, then quite frankly I have trouble staying interested.
- I guess "Swan Lake" was the go-to movie monster music.
