User reviews

All four Mummy films by Hammer I like. Curse with atmospheric scenes does give a quality to it. You have fog bound London to add atmosphere. Sets on film re Egyptian biz are quite good.Story so-so various characters who crop up. Then we have the Mummy itself which looks quite impressive, with scenes with Mummy in like in fog top of steps near embankment etc, scene in study where curtains are concealing it. Another scene in house where Mummy ascending stairs, menacing and quite gripping. Odd comical relief in film re certain characters. Overall film has some merit to it!

Curse of the mummy's tomb certainly is not a best effort from Hammer studios, as many of their true classics outshine it without any serious effort. However, it is not as much a disaster as many comments here in IMDb suggest. The movie doesn't have any Hammer's big stars in the cast, the story doesn't bring anything new into the mummy myth, and at few times the going gets unintentionally hilarious in the film. But on the other hand, the characters are acted quite solidly, even if the performances don't truly shine. Comical reliefs are mostly done with certain style, especially by Fred Clark as a P.T. Barnum replica, and the plot has few interesting twists. We even have here few scenes of surprisingly graphic of it's time, if a bit unrealistic screen violence, if that's your cup of tea. Slow pace and low action rate of the film works more for than against the movie, at least in my books, and the whole package is short enough, so the story can carry it all through till the end.

All in all, if you're a fan of old horror films, give it a go, whether you're a fan of Hammer studios works or not. At least this one certainly beats the stuffing out of it's follow-up, Mummy's shroud, which in my opinion truly deserves any public stoning it gets.

This is my truth - what is yours?

This may not be the best of The Mummy films from Hammer, but it is handsomely filmed and well acted by a fine British cast--especially TERENCE MORGAN, RONALD HOWARD and YVONNE ROLAND as the charming feminine lead. The less you know about the Terence Morgan character (Adam), the more you'll enjoy the plot.

The story requires a lot of exposition at the start which means a lot of talky and static scenes before the real suspense starts. The tale is not exactly original in concept. Again, the mummy has come to life to kill the people who've exploited him. High among his priorities is the fast-talking, rather obnoxious American showman (FRED CLARK) who is anxious to make a profit on exhibiting the mummy in show biz style.

DICKIE OWEN makes a formidable mummy with the help of some fine make-up effects but it is really the convincing performances of the three principals that makes the story credible.

I missed hearing James Bernard's background music, usually a strong point in any Hammer horror film.

Summing up: Easy enough to watch but you have to be patient to get past the slow start.

While definitely not as much a first-rate production as Hammer's first Mummy, Curse of the Mummy's Tomb has some great camerawork, nice supporting performances, and an intriguing mummy plot. Archaeologists financed by an American P. T. Barnum type find a lost tomb and open it despite the curse that says whosoever is present at its opening should die. Hammer production values prevail with lush costumes and sets. George Pastell(from the original) is back as yet another Egyptian naysayer out to prove that the British had no right to take and break the sacred nature of treasure and memory of forgotten kings. Michael Ripper, Jack Gwillim, and Fred Clark excel in their supporting roles, clearly out-performing the rather tiresome and boring leads of Terence Morgan, Ronald Howard, and Jeanne Roland. Clark gives an impressive performance(as well as very affable one) as the American out to turn his mummy find into carnival magic, taking the show to the "American Heartland" for a dime a peep. The story is not the fastest paced story around, but once the mummy's casket gets opened....people die. Definitely worth a look for the mummy fan.

All Hammer Movies had that look. They had a way of presenting Color in a formula of their own design and it is part of their appeal to this day. In a word, it is sumptuous. Here we have the Studio's second Mummy Movie as our old friend is awakened once again to materialize the proverbial Curse.

It has a rather talky first half but the verbiage is slightly interesting and the "Mummy as Sideshow" is a new take. The second half kicks into gear and moves quite energetically, well as energetic as a Mummy can be. He seems determined to wreak the necessary havoc and does so quite brutally.

In the finale things really come together with a Plot twist and an exciting chase through the sewers. Overall, this is mid-range Hammer and that is almost always better than the Studio's contemporaries. Definitely worth a view for Hammer, Horror, and B-Movie Fans.

Hammer movies have always been a tad hokey and that's forgivable, some sloppy writing however isn't.

This is the second Hammer Horror movie from "The Mummy" franchise and this time the star power has taken quite a dip. No longer did they have the presence of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and that really showed.

It tells the story of a rich American who plans on making the opening of a mummy's sarcophagus a tourist event in order to make money but oddly enough things don't go quite as planned.

The film looks great, the performances though spotty are mostly passable and the Hammer Horror brand of musical score is present. It's all very colour by numbers stuff, but that's okay.

Sadly the writing is inconsistent, some is poor and some is baffling especially when it comes to character development.

Passable stuff but again this underlines why though I appreciate Hammer Horror I've never exactly been blown away by it.

The Good:

Looks great

The Bad:

The absence of the likes of Cushing/Lee is very damaging

The bulletproof bandages have returned!

Mummy actually looks worse

No character consistency

Awful cover art

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

Belly dancing is sexy or awkward, never anything inbetween

When the discovery of a strange coffin in the Egyptian desert leads to a mysterious rash of murders as the recovery party arrives in London, it's eventually found to be the work of an ancient spell that reanimated the body of the pharaoh within leading them on a race to stop the creature's rampage.

This was a below-average and pretty forgettable entry in the series. The biggest issue with the film is the fact that there's hardly any action at all within this, focusing way too much on extraneous plot-points the keep the film running along at a dreadfully boring pace. For all the talk here of curses that are mentioned in the first half, hardly any of it makes the film go along any faster while it tends to focus on issues relating to everything but the curse. Instead, we get a rather pointless love triangle that eats up absurd amounts of time only to have it be taken away by the fact the third wheel steals her away for a secondary purpose his involvement didn't need to still get the same effect and causing her to back anyway, a massively confusing and curious chain of events that comes off very badly. Likewise, the dealings with the artifacts and their importance in solving the mystery of the brutal attacks makes the film go on for far too long and really becomes all the more flaccid by not doing anything. All in all, these tend to drag on together throughout the first half succeed so well in dragging the pace of the film out so much that it causes the actual attack to occur just shy of an hour into the movie, which is highly disconcerting. Only the back-story flashback of the origins of the mummy's identity within this section breaks up that monotony by showing the reasoning for his mummification, and after that there's a few shambling attacks spread out to really help the second half to have better pacing and more excitement. The finale chase does make for quite a fun time as the sewer battle does make up for some of the extreme boredom and the situation involving the cliché attraction does help this out by generating the kind of uplifting arc needed here. Along with the fine make-up on the creature, these good points do help out somewhat here though there's still a lot of problems within this one.

Today's Rating/PG: Violence.

This motion picture is supposed to be a kind of sequel to the terrific film starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee from 1959 but, compared to that one, this is a highly unimaginative and rather dull experience. The movie starts exiting enough, with a scientist getting slaughtered by angry and dangerous looking Egyptian priests…Unfortunately, the next 40 minutes are just a series of dull conversations and uninspired history lessons. The typical stereotypical American businessman wants the bandaged body of Ra to be in an amusements park, while the serious British archaeologist wants it to be in a classy museum…very uninteresting, I tell you. Curse also lacks a few decent and convincing actors and Jeanne Dubois – as the love interest Anette – fades away when set next to the other Hammer Egyptian queens like Valerie Léon (Blood from the Mummy's Tomb) and Yvonne Furneaux (The Mummy). The film becomes a bit more watchable when the mummy finally is going on his rampage in the streets of London...he even ends up in the sewers!! Which brings me to the most positive element of Curse of the Mummy's Tomb!! The creepy and dusty looking make-up! The filthy bandages and the impressively shot images of Ra alone are worth the effort. The ending is more or less surprising and satisfying but it doesn't save the entire finish product. A real shame, I think, because mummies ( and the Ancient Egypt in general ) are such a fascinating and astonishing source of inspiration for terrifying horror tales.

On an Egyptian expedition, a group of British explorers stumble across the hidden tomb of the pharaoh Ra (yes, I know, quite original). But once they bring him back to England for exhibition, they find the tomb to be empty. Did someone steal this priceless specimen or is the curse real, with a lumbering corpse walking the streets of London ready to kill those who disturbed his rest? Has a good mummy film been made in thirty years? I can't think of a recent one, "The Mummy" with Brendan Fraser really isn't all that great. The 90s were not mummy-friendly. The 80s? Not so much. Vampires, zombies... no problem. Even werewolves get the occasional bone tossed to them ("Dog Soldiers"). Where are the mummies? I don't know. But I do know you can find one seriously cool mummy in this film.

The actual mummy doesn't appear until the third act, with about twenty minutes left. We are instead treated to the conflicts, deceptions and internal politics of these competing archaeologists. And, believe it or not, this works. A good plot is unraveled with interesting characters... Hammer Studios didn't use the usual cast (sorry, Lee and Cushing) but gave us others that are equally capable. A romance blossoms that pays off later on in the film.

Mummy films are interesting, or at least this one is, if thought of as a moral tale about invading and desecrating a foreign culture. Sure, we can talk of a curse that kills those who disturb a mummy's rest. But how often do Egyptians dig up their own kings? It's more often... the Brits. So, there's something of a moral suggesting the Brits, a dominant empire, shouldn't be meddling in the affairs of weaker nations, stealing their heritage for monetary gain. Would the Brits want Egyptians digging up William the Conqueror? (Then again, maybe they would.) Things take a bizarre turn later on that you'll have to see to believe. One of the archaeologists is not who he says he is. And yes, you really ought to see this film. I watched it courtesy of the Icons of Horror box set featuring four classic Hammer films, and I can now say that all four are worth watching, and even owning. Hammer knew horror, and some of their gems at the time make today's horror look silly in comparison. Until a better mummy film comes along (and I've been waiting decades) this is the one to see.

The biggest surprise about this film is the presence in a Hammer production (it's actually shot at Elstree) of Hollywood veteran Fred Clark playing a vulgar huckster who anachronistically refers to ragtime and (it says here) came up with the name for Turkish Delight and (SPOILER COMING:) perversely falls foul of the mummy having just performed his one good deed.

Five years had elapsed since they first explored the legend of the Mummy. Hammer's mummy films were never terribly good and by the time they resumed the franchise with this well-dressed but poky little potboiler they were obviously serving pretty thin gruel; with Michael Carreras plainly taking on the direction because he came cheap.

The mummy's asthmatic wheezing is seriously scary, Ronald Howard brings a certain grace and good humour to the role of the head of the expedition but despite the terrific title that this was a highly inferior piece of work is demonstrated by default by the fleeting use on a couple occasions of Franz Reizenstein's superb score from Hammer's original.

After a cripplingly slow start, the second-half of this low-budget (even by Hammer standards) tale is quite lively and gruesome. Devotees may miss Cushing and Lee but Hammer alumnus Michael Ripper IS on hand, as an unlikely Cockney-accented Egyptian called Ahmed. Director Michael Carreras liked to shoot all his films in widescreen and the film is probably best seen in its original Hammerscope format.

This is not that bad of a mummy movie. It's no where near as good as The Mummy (1932) with Boris Karloff but it is almost as good as the Kharis mummy series (Tom Tyler & Lon Chaney Jr as the mummy for that series). Nor is this film quite as good as The Mummy (1959) with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee (as Kharis) BUT I do feel that The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964) is an underrated mummy movie on IMDb.

Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964) is about Egyptian prince Ra aka Ra-Antef - the Mummy. His tomb was discovered by Egyptologists and they are wanting to display and tour with the discovered mummy. But someone decides to resurrect the mummy... who and why?

Overall a fun but underrated film. Worth watching if you like mummy movies.

7/10

A shame, because a lot of Hammer's films are great or at least very entertaining. But unlike 1959's The Mummy directed by Terrence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb is not one of their finest hours. Not unwatchable by all means but very much a lesser effort for them.

The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb is a good-looking film at least, thankfully not having the rushed and made-on-the-quick-and-cheap production values of the Universal Kharis Mummy films. The chilling Hammer atmosphere is present in how the film looks, with the sumptuous Gothic sets, lush photography that does a fine job evoking some atmosphere, much tighter editing and rich bold colours. The music score is hauntingly stirring, and while The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb is too often dull it really does pick up in the final twenty minutes. The final twenty minutes make the film, with the film being at its most horrifying and suspenseful by some considerable distance, with some gruesome but not overly-gratuitous shocks(i.e. the amputation scene) and a tense and exciting sewer chase.

Regarding the acting, the supporting cast fare far better than the leads. George Pastell brings a lot of charisma to his role, Jack Gwillum is movingly sympathetic and in particular Fred Clark plays a very sleazy character with intensity and lively and often funny comic timing. The very much-forgotten Dickie Owen, while just lacking the imposing creepiness of Christopher Lee and the pathos of Boris Karloff(much better than Lon Chaney Jnr though, at least Owen's heart seemed in it), is still a very formidable Mummy and is aided by some cool make-up. One just wishes he was on screen for longer and was introduced earlier.

On the other hand, the pacing really hurts The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb. It starts off well, but for at least three quarters of an hour(most of the film), the film is very tediously paced and painfully predictable, with the less eventful scenes dragging interminably and even with a few surprise twists here and there everything just felt very over-familiar. There is very little tension, thrills or sense of dread or horror, further let down by a pointless and saccharinely written love triangle that takes up far too much of the film. It also feels far too talky and stilted, with the romantic parts being truly banal, the humour while sometimes amusing and well-played at other points overdone, unneeded or not the best placed and the speeches, sideshows and history lessons didn't properly maintain interest.

While the supporting cast acquit themselves well, the three leads aren't too great. Ronald Howard is the least bad, but he has given far more involved performances, he has presence but at other points he sleepwalks through his role. Terrence Morgan is a wooden bore, though that his character is very underwritten doesn't help in, but Jeanne Roland fares the worst. Despite her exotic looks, Roland spends the entire time looking lost and is not always easy to understand, at worst incomprehensible. Michael Carreras has his moments, he shines in the last act with some of his visual directing and storytelling being almost worthy of the best of Hammer, but most of it sadly is very routine, competent and technically accomplished but he forgets to make the story and characters interesting so fails to engage the viewer as a result.

All in all, despite it coming to life in the last twenty minutes amongst a few other things, The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb is one of the lesser and duller Hammer films. 5/10 Bethany Cox

Hammer Films which took over the famous Universal horror icons did a mummy's tale with The Curse Of The Mummy's Tomb. A little bit of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray story was weaved into the plot of this movie.

Set at the turn of the last century, three archaeologists unearth the tomb of a crown prince of Egypt who legend has it was slain by his brother a few thousand years BC. But someone with reasons of his own to finance the expedition has used some ancient spells to revive the dead and the prince is out settling a few scores against those who've violated his sleep.

Terrance Morgan stars in this film and he's the fellow with the Dorian Gray situation. He's got an agenda himself working here at it involves putting an end to his Dorian Gray like existence and being reunited in eternity with his true love. In that sense a leaf is borrowed from the classic original Mummy film that starred Boris Karloff.

Which happens to be my favorite horror film of all time so every other mummy film just pales in comparison. Still The Curse Of The Mummy's Tomb has enough on its own merits to rate some comparison and Terrence Morgan who is best remembered on the big screen for playing Laertes to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet does a fine job here as a most tortured soul.

After Hammer's first successful stab at a mummy film (THE MUMMY - 1959) it's pretty rough going with their bandaged follow-ups. This one was not quite as unwatchable as I feared, but was still a limp and rather average affair that I don't see myself revisiting any time soon, if ever. A typical group of treasure seekers uncovers another Egyptian carcass which ultimately gets put on public display by a sleazy American showman, but mysteriously disappears and starts killing people. There's a lot of dull filler through most of this, but by the time the mummy starts stomping there was more action than I was lead to believe from others' reviews. This mummy's makeup isn't too bad, and he's more inventive than most with some of his killing techniques.

** out of ****

This is my second favourite mummy film - just after Hammer's own 1959 classic - but for the most part it plays like a period drama/mystery. Gorgeous, richly atmospheric London, misty and oh so lushly coloured, is the real star of the film. There's also some good supporting performances - George Pastell is especially good as dignified and long- suffering Bey - but the hero is worse than a bull in china shop. Heroine (Jeanne Roland, dubbed with verrry Frrrench accent ) is at least decorative. When she starts to eye Terence Morgan's charm offensive, I couldn't care less about "betrayal".

It's Egypt in the year 1900. French Egyptologist Professor Eugene Dubois is tortured and killed by locals. Englishmen John Bray (Ronald Howard) and Giles Dalrymple (Jack Gwillim) as well as Dubois' daughter Annette (Jeanne Roland) are all shocked. Their greedy American benefactor Alexander King (Fred Clark) insists on taking the artifacts on a world traveling sideshow rather than keeping them in an Egyptian museum. Their first stop is London.

This is a Hammer Film Productions film and it is what one expects. The production is pretty good for this type of movie. It has enough blood and gore for the time. The mummy looks good although he's the slow-moving kind. This could use more action and killing.

The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb is Hammer's second foray into ancient Egypt...and it's not as good as the first. Not even nearly. None of the cast from 'The Mummy' has returned (probably because they read the script), and the film lacks both the ingenuity and good-natured style that has come to be associated with Hammer productions. In fact, this film goes directly against what Hammer fans have come to love about their films as about two thirds of it is frankly boring! The film is far too talky, and it diffuses any sense of dread or horror that the film contains. To be honest, I have no idea why Hammer studios ever green-lighted it. The story is basically a re-run of the first film, except there's far more chat about the pitfalls of taking ancient relics away from a Mummy's tomb, as opposed to the far more interesting subject of Egyptian mythology. We follow an American that is very much like J. Jameson from the Spiderman films, who decides to make a sideshow out of a mummy and ends up feeling the Mummy's curse after a whole load of boring nonsense.

When the film does finally get going, it isn't bad as we've got a mummy going round bumping people off left, right and centre; but it takes far too long to get to this stage, and by the time it does you couldn't care less about the mummy, the characters or anything else about the film. Many people seem to be giving the film small plaudits for the mummy's make-up, but I honestly can't see why. It looks like something some kid made in a Paper Mache class (assuming kids have Paper Mache classes, of course) and nothing like what you'd expect to find in a horror movie. The Mummy suffers because it's boring, lacks invention and doesn't feature enough horror. This is by far the worst Hammer film I've seen, and if you really have to see it I recommend fast-forwarding the first hour and just watching the ending. Feel free to disregard my sage advice, but I don't doubt that you'll wish you'd heeded it when the credits finally role.