'Mummy' Resurrected: Boris Karloff's Evildoer Rises From the Tomb

| Print Post This | Like (0) | Comments (0)

SUMMER IS ALWAYS a good time for classic movies on DVD, as most of those old films are being remade as summer blockbusters. Already, this summer has yielded new editions of all three "Indiana Jones" movies along with all the "Batman" flicks (except those terrible Joel Schumacher sequels).

Now, as a tie-in with the third installment of Brendan Frasier's "Mummy" series, Universal is giving the 1932 "Mummy" the special-edition treatment, with many bonus features to unwrap.

One of the studio's earliest monster movies, "The Mummy" is well researched and surprisingly creepy. Whether wrapped up as the mummy Im-ho-tep or covered in wrinkle makeup as Ardath Bey, Boris Karloff is sublimely menacing, a scene-stealing villain for the comparatively bland British archaeologists. It's no wonder director Karl Freund cuts away repeatedly to close-ups of the star's dead-on stare, but as he did with Frankenstein a year earlier, Karloff plays Bey as ultimately sympathetic, driven to evildoing by thwarted love.

The special features on this set have conflicting goals, as most such tie-ins do. One on hand, the set wants to place "The Mummy" alongside Universal's horror classics and explain its influence on 80 years of fright flicks. Film historians and Hollywood technicians alike extol the sinister calm of Karloff's performance and the inventiveness of Jack Pierce's makeup work, and everyone seems to have a wild story to tell about star Zeta Johann, a Broadway actress whose disdain for Hollywood was legendary.

But that undertaking is at odds with the set's obligation to market the new "Mummy" sequel starring Frasier and Jet Li, in an attempt to give the more recent blockbuster the sheen of old Hollywood glamour.

But the new franchise, while admittedly fun, has more in common with the "Indiana Jones" spectacles than with its namesake film, so that any direct connections, especially in the disjointed doc "Unveiling the Legacy of 'The Mummy,'" seemed particularly forced. The '99 version is all explosions and one-liners, while the original is a long, chilling stare into eyes that convey the void of 3,000 years locked in a tomb.

Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner

Photos courtesy Universal