The Ghost and Mr. Chicken - Pure Comedy Gold

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966) is pure comedy gold. The humor is this film will have you rolling in the aisles with laughter. I've laughed so hard myself from watching this film that tears rolled down my eyes. Actor Don Knotts has the most animated face in the history of entertainment. His facial gestures alone will have you laughing throughout the entire film. This film is a series of five films that Knotts starred in from 1966 to 1971 for Universal Studios. He also appears in The Reluctant Astronaut (1967), The Shakiest Gun in the West, (1968), The Love God (1969), and How to Frame a Figg (1971). The Ghost and Mr. Chicken is Knotts' first major project after leaving The Andy Griffith Show on television. All five films are sold as a Blu-Ray set from Shout Factory. The films can be purchased separately also.  

Knotts plays Luther Heggs, a typesetter for the local newspaper, The Rachel Courier Express, in Rachel, Kansas. The citizens of Rachel have avoided a run-down mansion in the town owned by the Simmons family. The Simmons mansion bears a striking resemblance to the Munsters Mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Twenty years earlier, Simmons murdered his wife and then committed suicide in the mansion. The town is approaching the twenty-year anniversary of the murder-suicide. Rumors in the town suggest that the mansion is haunted.

Heggs happens to notice a local man named Calver Weems being hit on the head with a board in front of the Simmons mansion and runs to tell his boss (Dick Sargent) at the newspaper that the man was murdered. His colleagues at the newspaper and the town citizens laugh at Heggs when it turns out that the man was not murdered but is alive and well. Heggs gets a reputation for having an overactive imagination.

As the twenty-year anniversary of the Simmons murder-suicide approaches, Heggs writes a small filler article about the Simmons story. The article gets lots of attention from the local citizens. To follow up on the popular story, Heggs' boss challenges him to stay a night in the mansion. Being the awkward dunce that Heggs is known for, no one has any confidence that he will stay in the mansion for one night.

Heggs decides to stay overnight in the murder mansion to prove he is not a coward and encounters a number of ghostly apparitions. He sees a portrait of Mrs. Simmons on the wall with garden shears stuck in her neck and blood flowing from the painting. In the organ loft of the mansion, a dusty old organ with blood stained keys plays all by itself. Heggs throws a book at a bookcase, and a secret passage opens behind the bookcase.

Heggs manages to make it an entire night in the mansion and later writes an article about his experiences. Nicholaus Simmons, a surviving family member, sues Heggs for writing the article and demands that he retract his story. Before making a ruling on the case, the judge orders that the jurors and town citizens take a tour of the Simmons mansion with Heggs leading the tour. Heggs tries to get the events of his overnight stay at the mansion to unfold once again, but with no success. The entire town writes off his experiences as an overactive imagination.    

The funny moments in this film are too many to mention. Heggs backs into a tree in front of the Simmons mansion and thinks he is being attacked. He turns around and karate chops the tree, as if he is confronting a person. A similar scene occurs when Heggs encounters a mannequin in the mansion and once again thinks he is being attacked, so he karate chops the mannequin. The expressions on Heggs' face will have you laughing for days. 

During Heggs' picnic speech at the town's Chamber of Commerce meeting, Heggs stands in front of a podium to give a speech about his experiences. His hands are shaking so much from nervousness that he eventually lets the wind blow his speech papers out of his hands. The microphone malfunctions during the mayor's speech at the meeting and he says to the town citizens: "The electrician must be a Democrat!" Heggs makes the same comment when the microphone malfunctions during his speech.

During his speech in front of the Chamber of Commerce, Heggs also tells the crowd: "I have been called brave. What is brave? Let me clarify this." This scene is particularly funny because Heggs shakes with nervousness as a person in the crowd yells out "Attaboy, Luther!"  Heggs sits at a table with a beautiful brunette he has a crush on named Alma (Joan Staley). After mentioning to Alma that they both have a love of food in common, He tells Alma "I just love good food. My mother loved good food. She used to say I'd rather have good food than bad food any day of the week." Many of his comments to Alma in the film appear to be very awkward, but this helps to express Heggs' shy and awkward personality.

For absolute Halloween fun and scares - don't miss The Ghost and Mr. Chicken this Halloween season. Happy viewing.

-- Steve D. Stones

Lugosi is magnificent in the oft overlooked Murders in the Rue Morgue

 

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As the reader can note above, Plan9Crunch recently received a PDF copy of Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us! More Dark Alleys of Classic Horror Cinema, McFarland, 2024, by genre author Gregory William Mank. It's an excellent read. Mank's style of blending history, film news, drama, gossip -- and impromptu profiles of film principals -- is on display.  However, there's too much information to write a simple book review. Over the next couple of years, I'll review a chapter on a film, with links to purchase the book. Here's the McFarland link.

Mank can surprise us with gathered facts. Take Murders in the Rue Morgue, 1932, the first chapter of the book. I always thought it failed at the box office. But I'm wrong. It nabbed a modest profit, $63,000, for Universal after the big hits of Dracula and Frankenstein. But nevertheless, it caused professional decay to Bela's career. His inability to get a major role in Frankenstein, followed by the major success of Frankenstein and subsequently Boris Karloff replacing Bela as Universal's top horror star, was the embryo of his troubled screen career.

Mank notes that in post-Dracula Hollywood a serial assaulter/killer of women called "The Ape Man" terrified Los Angeles. The killer was never caught. The author compares this historical anecdote with the emergence of Charles Gemora's creepy gorilla in Murders in the Rue Morgue. Lugosi, after James Whale froze him out of Frankenstein, was assigned the title role of Doctor Mirakle. Robert Florey, edged out of Frankenstein, directed. He replaced the Spanish Dracula's director George Melford, also edged out of a plum directing assignment.

In the essay, Mank relates that Murders in the Rue Morgue caught the attention of the Hollywood code police and state censors. I had always thought that it seemed a tamer film but Mank notes that in its release form it is very pre-code. At the Grand Guignol opening scene, Lady Fatima and her Arab Angels perform a revealing "strip dance" that focuses on the middle front portion of the dancers' bodies. Men leer openly. Various censors scissored this scene.

Also, more provocative is Arlene Francis' short performance. After Mirakle snatches her streetwalker character from the dark streets, we quickly cut to Francis, terrified, screaming, in agony and dying, on an X-shaped cross. A crazed Mirakle is hoping that her blood will match with the blood of Erik, his gorilla. Although it's never specifically mentioned, it's clear today -- and I'm sure in 1932 -- to audiences that Mirakle plans to mate the gorilla with the woman. It doesn't happen, as a furious Mirakle accuses the streetwalker's blood of being "rotten." The death then occurs and Lugosi tells his black servant Janos (Noble Johnson) to drop her into the Seine, which flows below. This scene was scissored by some censors too in 1932.

One more pre-code scene later is when Erik attacks the mother of the film's heroine in her home. The gorilla kills her brutally in a manner that suggests a rape, as Mank notes. The gorilla then stuffs her corpse face first up the chimney and escapes with her daughter, Camille (Sidney Fox), back to Mirakle's lair to possibly "match" her blood with Erik's.

According to Mank's research, Lugosi was withdrawn and mostly silent during film production. Mank surmises that Lugosi may have sensed that Florey didn't like directing him. The director, we learn, would have preferred less Doctor Mirakle in the finished product. Another reason may be that Bela resented Sydney Fox being the nominal star of the film. Fox was alleged to be the current mistress of Universal honcho Carl Laemmle Jr. She's pleasant to look at, but her acting is poor in the film, in my opinion.

Readers may note that I have not mentioned most other principal actors. The reason is nearly all are mediocre and offer virtually no quality to the film. Leon Waycoff (later Leon Ames) is the romantic lead and he is just terrible. He makes David Manners look like an Oscar-quality actor. He giggles and preens with his love, Camille, which is appropriate since Fox's acting trends the same. Later in the film he whines when Camille is in mortal danger.

Ames did enjoy a long career in film. He was an established character actor. I once noticed him in a 1967 The Andy Griffith Show episode, playing a prudish high school principal.

Sidney Fox, as Mank relates, had an unhappy future. She was out of films by 1935 and spent her personal life in an unhappy, on-again-off-again marriage. In 1942 she was discovered dead in her bed with an empty prescription bottle.

Some actors with small parts who are good are D'Arcy Corrigan as the morgue keeper, Noble Johnson as Janos, Lugosi's strong man, and Arlene Francis in her small role as the streetwalker. Gemora is effective as the gorilla, but Florey made the post-filming error of using shots of a real gorilla in facial closeups. It's a big mistake. It looks forced and lessens the screen impact of Erik.

Lugosi, as mentioned, is magnificent in the film. In the opening scene, viewers can't help cheering the crazed doctor as he defends "science" against the religious intolerants in the audience that boo his Darwin theories. As a mad doctor, he is implacable, full of mad righteous fury in his desire to grab the comely virgin Camille to experiment with. He delivers his dialogue, not just vocally but with strong facial expressions and body movement. Lugosi is the reason this film, which suffers when Bela is not on film, earned a profit.

Florey, as Mank notes, showed off his skill at creating scenarios that matched the plot. He writes: "Cinematically, the film is still a dazzler. Florey and Freund (Karl Freund is the cinematographer) make Paris so Caligari-esque that one almost expects Conrad Veidt's Cesare to step out of the myriad of shadows and join Erik during the rooftop chase. While the film is set in Paris, it as the scent -- perhaps more than any other 1932 Hollywood movie -- of depraved and decadent Weimar Berlin."

Even with the colorless Fox and Waycoff, Florey's scene of Sidney being pushed on a swing is an act of cinema elegance and beauty. Even the scene with Francis, dying in a skimpy garment and tattered boots, crucified on an X-shaped cross, has a dark beauty.

To avoid the stretches of needless comedy and poor acting, I've thought that Murders in the Rue Morgue might have been improved -- and perhaps retain a better legacy -- had Florey began the film with the streetwalker scene and profane crucifixion. It's a well-shot, fascinating horror scene. Its early inclusion would not have hurt the pace too much as the Grand Guignol sequence is very impressive.

Murders in the Rue Morgue is easy to find and buy inexpensively. It occasionally pops up on Turner Classic Movies. Mank did a fine job of telling its history in Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us ... and we will explore more films in the book in the future.

-- Doug Gibson

Kharis 4: The Mummy’s Curse Reviewed

 

A Plan9Crunch analysis from Joseph Gibson

 

Previous Recent Kharis Reviews:

https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-mummys-hand-reviewing-kharis.html

https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-mummys-tomb-reviewing-kharis.html

https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-mummys-ghost-reviewing-kharis.html

 Introduction: The Ship of Theseus

 

Please forgive the title and format change for this review series; in my head, this was quite clever and apt.  By this point in the Kharis tetralogy, there was no substantial creative figure I can find that was still in the franchise that had been previously.  (Each film had a different director, but writer Griffin Jay and producer Ben Pivar were the constants before this, but now Bernard Schubert has taken over writing arguments, based on a story from Leon Abrams and Dwight V. Babcock, while Oliver Drake is the producer.)  There is really no single piece of this creative experience that was present from the days of the Mummy’s Hand, so I thought why not make my review match that in some way.

 

It brings to mind the thought paradox of the Ship of Theseus.  If every piece of the whole has been swapped out, is it even the same ship anymore, and at what point did it change?  This is still a Kharis film, with Ananka and the evil mysterious High Priests, but Kharis isn’t Tom Tyler, Ananka isn’t Ramsay Ames and not only are the Priests called Arkam not Karnak now but Andoheb, our main tether to this cult, is gone.  The setting also, rather bizarrely, is different now.  Some of these changes happened gradually, with tethers to the old still present, but ripping off the Band-aid with how different this film is even from the last one raises a certain question.  Is this still even the same series anymore?  I would say yes, but you’ll have to be in suspense as to my reasoning for quite a while.  Despite also starting this review differently than before, I, like Kharis, am still here, for better or for worse and this review is built on my previous analyses of this series, just like the movie is built on his previous escapades.

 

Of Name Discrepancies 

 

Because I was unsure how fully to commit to the Ship of Theseus bit, I actually watched this film not on my captioned dvd but on Internet Archive without captions: in a completely different format which also happened to correspond to a different experience. Consequently, and it is actually very interesting this happened, I cannot say for sure what certain character names are (and neither can internet sources).  Does Kay Harding play Betty Ward as IMDB claims or Betty Walsh (wikipedia)?  It certainly sounds more like Walsh, and her uncle is named Walsh.  Is Peter Coe’s High Priest character named Doctor Ilzor Zardad or Ilzor Zardaab?  Those would sound similar no matter what, so I don’t lean one way or the other. 

 

I generally trust Wikipedia (or at least the sources it links to) more than IMDB, but Wikipedia also calls Tante Berthe’s Cafe (the sign clearly visible multiple times in the movie) a pub.  It is really interesting to me that there is such a large disagreement and even more interesting that I got to be a part of that experience by accidentally taking away the option to have an answer.  The name differences do not matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.  I will call Ilzor Ilzor and Betty Betty (the funny thing about that is that this is also how the credits refer to them, just their first names).

 

The Beginning of the Movie

 

This film is set in rural Louisiana (somehow Kharis, Peanuts, Tom and the mob in the last movie all made the 1382-mile trek from Massachusetts to Louisiana during that climactic chase scene) and opens at the Tante Berthe’s Cafe with a musical number from Tante Berthe.  Character Cajun Joe hits on her and seems somewhat like a sleazeball but one they put up with, while another character named Achilles alludes to Kharis being around as a town legend after winding up in the swamp 25 years before.

 

The actual plot begins when the Southern Engineering Company, represented through belligerent Pat Walsh (Betty’s uncle), aims to drain the swamp that contains Kharis, much to everyone else’s chagrin on account of a recent disappearance and murder attributed to The Mummy or Rougarou/Loup-Garou (pesky captionless print; the Rougarou and Loup-Garou are technically different and either would make sense in this context).  Two doctors from the Scripps Museum (which previously housed Ananka), Ilzor and James Halsey, show up to try to reclaim Kharis and Ananka from the swamp.  Ilzor, it turns out, is there to reclaim them not for the museum but for the cult.  

 

Now, there has been at the very least a 25 year time skip, and seemingly Ilzor and another character already planted in the Louisiana town called Ragheb (Martin Kosleck’s character) are all that remain of the cult of Arkam.  It makes enough sense, given how Andoheb sent The Beggar, Mehemet Bey, and Yousef Bey into dangerous scenarios that got them killed, that Andoheb might have run this cult into the ground offscreen (even if that is a little contrived), but I will actually commend the detail that Ilzor was planted in the museum.  As far as damage control following Dr. Ayad figuring out the secret of the tana leaves, it makes sense for the cult to infiltrate their enemies.  (As for how Andoheb would know about that, The Mummy's Ghost showed both him and Yousef to be very adept at interpreting information from the gods in prayer.)  It just feels like there is a film missing where a dying Andoheb sent Ilzor as their last hope to revive Kharis and annihilate anyone who knows their secret and where Kharis somehow wound up in Louisiana.

 

Ilzor at least has learned from Yousef’s mistake of trying to outright control Kharis by trying to reason with him mostly.  This brings us to the obligatory backstory explanation with stock footage where Ilzor instructs Ragheb in their tana ritual, and the caretaker of the monastery where they are keeping Kharis arrives only for Kharis to kill him.  Ilzor informs Kharis that he will have to find Ananka, and, throughout these scenes, the tana leaves are once again confusing.  Three to keep Kharis alive is mentioned again (though he would have spent 25 years without any, so does he need them for his heart to beat?), but there is a scene where an already moving Kharis is given his 9 tana leaves (9 are supposed to give him motivation and movement, but consistently, he has been already moving to receive those 9, so he should be uncontrollable in all the films, which he admittedly is in these last two but for character reasons, not tana reasons).

 

The Return and Recasting of Princess Ananka

 

Next, a hand and later a body emerge from dirt nearby the swamp.  This being walks stiffly, like a Mummy, from being caked in mud, but the sunlight above empowers her to walk normally after she washes off.  This is Virginia Christine’s Princess Ananka.

 

Now, this hardly feels like the same character as Ramsay Ames in the previous film, and that is technically both a good and bad thing.  Amina was trapped between two battling identities, and the amnesia here should serve as a reset for at least one of those personalities.  If last time the spirit of Ananka inhabited the normally witty Amina, this time the amnesiac Princess Ananka should be our true introduction to this character as she uncovers at least one of her dormant personalities.  In this movie, she alternates between a bubbly and helpful nature that is knowledgeable about Egyptology or almost full catatonia where all she can do is mutter Kharis, run from the mummy and pass out.

 

It is in her less lucid moments that Cajun Joe finds her, tells her he can take her to find help, goes through the side door of Tante Berthe’s cafe, lays her on the bed, and, surprisingly, actually does go get Tante Berthe for help, leaving to get the doctor once Tante Berthe starts helping Ananka.  I don’t want to allude too much to R rated subject matter, but this scene, especially with the context of Cajun Joe as a bit of lecherous Ne’er-do-well, resembles a particular kind of heinous assault especially with Ananka being groggy (implicitly the moonlight and Arkam magic have a drug like effect on her to achieve this state), and I will applaud the film for subverting this imagery to henceforth establish Cajun Joe as a very strong and moral character.  It actually contextualizes why the beginning of this film is structured so that we start in Tante Berthe’s with him and not with the remaining priests of Arkam as per usual.  We have already seen the Mummy and the priests, but there is still suspense to be had in establishing the dynamics of these new townsfolk.

 

Next, Kharis finds her and kills Tante Berthe, the fleeing Ananka winding up with Halsey, Betty and Dr. Cooper, but, before I get into that, I would like to finish discussing Ananka as a character.  As I mentioned, her catatonic and absentminded moments tend to correspond either to nighttime (a good plot justification for setting the action during the scarier nighttime) or odd circumstances involving Arkam priests that said priests take credit for (her mind goes blank when she sees Ilzor during the next day, and he claims that he was trying to lure her back to Kharis in that moment).  During the day, specifically when the sun is up, she shows greater humanity, as she is an agreeable and knowledgeable person that can help Halsey out by identifying and dating Kharis’ wraps because the wrappings were different in Amenophis’ era than after apparently. 

 

The film treats this like Ananka surfacing, but Ananka would only know the Amenophis wrappings and not be able to compare across the centuries, right?  We have never seen Arkam cultists talk about the specifications of the wrappings; it is Amina that associated closely with Egyptologist Professor Norman and checked out books from the college.  (That said, it is possible that Ananka, however long her spirit was in the Scripps Museum, may have observed figures like Steve Banning or Dr. Ayad in their studies, but if she can’t remember either earthly existence, why would she remember her ghostly one?)

 

The Mummy’s Curse

 

The scenes of Kharis chasing her and their dueling motifs make for very interesting cinema to analyze.  She is at her strongest in the sun but still cannot remember herself (or ultimately escape her fate of being recaptured and magically mummified), and Kharis is at his strongest during the moonlight but is a slow-moving slave to his tragic pursuit of love.  There are moments where Ananka or the people protecting her are right in his grasp, but they move on without even noticing he was there.  Moments like that work well for tension because we have already seen his sheer power and brutal effectiveness, but it also communicates a pathetic tragedy, otherwise called “The Mummy’s Curse”.  He’s almost more of a ghost than a man and very out of focus in this film by comparison to the last while still carrying out his will where it intersects with the priests (though still also a downgrade in autonomy).  

 

The focus of this chase scene is on Ananka, engulfed in almost total darkness, an effectively scary scene because we, like Ananka, cannot see much of anything and do not know the layout, but Kharis is still out there, far closer than we realize.  When she ends up with Halsey and Betty, they step into more important roles and each survive confrontations with Ragheb and Kharis respectively, while all Kharis gets is a few more kills, an only somewhat frustrating climactic choice and finally to be buried and eventually put on display at the Scripps Museum.

Leading up to the climax, Kharis kills Dr. Cooper and destroys Betty’s tent to abduct Ananka, while Cajun Joe helps out in a search party for Ananka, Ragheb leads Betty into a trap, and Halsey follows Kharis to find Ragheb killing Ilzor (because Ragheb rather abruptly wants to take on Betty as a sinful bride).  Kharis can really play only the role of predator here; Chaney really isn’t given a chance to act much opposite Ananka, but his murders are fine.  I dislike that he ends up killing Cajun Joe for how much I actually appreciate the character, but Joe wasn’t really the lead of this ensemble, just the character who did the most for others, so his death means more than Achilles, the bartender or Goobie would.

 

Climax

 

Once the remaining core characters are all at the monastery, Ragheb and Halsey fight, and, first, I will just say this might be the most obligatory final fight between a designated protagonist and designated antagonist in any of these Classic Universal Monsters films.  Halsey and Ilzor had a connection, and Halsey grew suspicious of Ilzor briefly when he was trying to lure Ananka to Kharis, but this finale can proceed as if those scenes did not happen, a very bizarre choice.  Rather than flowing from a movie’s worth of buildup, Halsey and Ragheb are fighting because of only the most recent plot points, which is still logical, just not cathartic.

 

The more important part of this sequence is when Kharis turns on Ragheb, and, again, it makes sense in context but does not have much foreshadowing.  I like the idea that Kharis is so fed up with these priests failing, that he’ll kill them when they fall to temptation even when their temptation isn’t Ananka, and I also kind of like the idea that Kharis will be out of focus for most of this movie as part of the tragedy of his character, but I don’t think the film’s execution in weaving these plot threads together is exceptionally good.  Ragheb has no chance from the moment Kharis goes after him, meaning this ending is entirely reliant on the spectacle of the monastery falling around them (which is admittedly well done).  It is just also strange for Kharis to single out Ragheb, when Ragheb is the only person there that isn’t trying to take Ananka and Kharis back to the museum (this is Halsey’s whole reason for being there, and Ilzor should have told Kharis, while the denouement reveals that Betty plans to go with Halsey).

 

Making Ilzor the one to go after Betty would already make the climax more personal for Halsey (because the film decided for some reason he should be the lead instead of Cajun Joe), but it also would for Kharis, since Ragheb was only being instructed on how to care for Kharis by Ilzor, and it was Ilzor that demanded far less of and seemed for helpful to Kharis than any previous master.  For Kharis to lose that at the same time as Ananka (who he barely interacts with in this climax) and have to fight his way out would be very interesting.  

 

What we have is serviceable because Kharis still does lose the most benevolent and powerful master he had ever had, but I think it is undeniable that it would have been more interesting for Ilzor to be the final foe based on the same reason it was most interesting for Edelmann to be the final foe in House of Dracula: inserts an extra layer of tragedy while also engineering a scenario where our hero monster is the underdog.  Imagine for a moment a polished version of The Mummy’s Curse where Ilzor, as in the film, very carefully navigates his cult’s calling with satiating Kharis, feeding Kharis and trying to help him find Ananka while using his magic only on Ananka for that goal, until he does yield to his temptations and then does have to fight Kharis. The fight between an Arkam cultist at full power and Kharis, technically the weakest he has been in this series but the most motivated, not only carries proper tension and is based on the natural momentum of this series but also is the kind of fight I would expect to lead to a destroyed monastery, Ananka somehow becoming mummified and all the nearby tana leaves being destroyed.  As is, those just kind of happen, with the shallow justification that this is the final film.  

 

I don’t want to spend too much time here pitching a different film, because that isn’t really film criticism, but unless I am missing some important symbolism, the filmmakers choosing this ending over any other possibilities really weakens the foundations of this story and makes it seem less interesting.  Do you, the reader, still remember or care as much about the tense Cajun Joe subversion now that the film has decided he, our introductory character, is not important enough to have a stake in the climax?  If I hadn’t brought up the differing styles of Ilzor to previous High Priests, would you remember that when the final image the director Leslie Goodwins chose to show us was Kharis turning on Ragheb after the latter’s temptation was more abrupt than Yousef Bey’s (which itself required an act of god)?

 

Conclusion

 

If any one of these films qualifies as a cash grab, it would be The Mummy’s Curse.  If any one of these films would most benefit from polishing, additional drafts and a longer runtime, it would be this one (and that is saying a lot since that is true of all of these Kharis movies).  And, as I’ve already mentioned, this film is the odd one out, the Ship of Theseus, but it still does enough interesting things with the mythology of Kharis and Ananka (the sun and moon contrast is very simple but also really interesting) and the tragedy of both to have a place in this series.

 

The Mummy's Ghost: Reviewing The Kharis Tetralogy

 

By Joe Gibson

 

“The Mummy’s Ghost is pulp horror at its finest.  I confess to loving this lean, mean, never-a-wasted-minute B programmer from Universal.  There's no excess fat to trim from this film.  It’s like watching a good comic strip – every scene is key to the horror tale.  The film never takes itself too seriously, but at the same time does not descend to camp level.  It’s a damn good hour’s entertainment.  Film students who want to see how a good B film could provide fun to 1940’s movie-goers should make The Mummy’s Ghost required viewing.  It would have been great to view this in a theater with say, House of Frankenstein.” – Doug Gibson (From Plan9Crunch’s previous review of The Mummy’s Ghost.  Link here: https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-mummys-ghost-is-lean-mean-universal.html)

 

Introduction

 

Having argued the previous films in this series Adventure and Slasher respectively, I am now in somewhat of a dilemma since I do not think either fits The Mummy’s Ghost, but that raises more questions as to why this series stopped those specific types of experimentation.  It could be as simple as new director Reginald Le Borg having different sensibilities or that he expected to make a comedy and was saddled with this script or that he had troubles with some of the actors, especially Lon Chaney Jr that would limit his creativity.  Regardless of the reason, I am confident that this film is unlike its predecessors, mostly due to its presentation.

 

The opening of this film is not a call for sinister avenging so much as essentially a job interview for John Carradine’s Yousef Bey to retrieve Kharis and Ananka juxtaposed with a college class where Professor Norman explains the last film’s events in ways that would affect my previous review (first, he confirms that the flaming house was Banning’s which was easy enough to ascertain but is good to have confirmation of, and second, he says that hundreds of people saw Kharis, which would seem to imply the town and mob were bigger than we saw, which, as I kept bringing up makes that film far more contrived scene by scene if Mapleton is anything larger than a very small town).  Andoheb summarizes events a little differently than before, calling their order after the Hill Arkam rather than the temple of Karnak or waters of Kar and somewhat explicitly connecting the failed love of Kharis and Ananka to the temptations Andoheb and Mehemet Bey already fell to, which lays the groundwork for Kharis to be treated as a dynamic character and not just a slasher villain.  In this juxtaposition, Andoheb and Norman are also set up as mentor foils for young Tom Hervey and Yousef Bey, the wise old men with different perspectives on the events.  Most importantly, Yousef’s task isn’t to mete out revenge but just retrieve Kharis and Ananka (the conflict between Yousef, Tom and Kharis being that Ananka might not be as dead as we have been led to believe, despite also being a corpse in the museum).

 

So if the film has some set-up of Yousef securing resources and authority to venture deep into America and raid Ananka’s museum tomb to bring her back, while Tom learns the history from a mentor with different goals for keeping Ananka there (similar to the previous High Priest’s brief scenes instructing Andoheb in the first film), is this film just a morality swapped version of the adventure that was The Mummy’s Hand?  Not exactly.  While Kharis’ violence was only shown off at the end of The Mummy’s Hand on account of him being near dead for most of it (also being near dead at the start of this film I might add), Kharis gets an attack in on Professor Norman very soon into this movie (he was brewing 9 tana leaves for reasons I’ll get to later). The scene isn’t shot with the same creativity or suspense as any of Kharis’ earlier scenes.  While Kharis’ action of “kill where I find the tana leaves” dates back to Andoheb’s instructions in The Mummy’s Hand, the focus of the scene is actual on the mystery of what is going on with Amina Mansori, Tom’s Egyptian girlfriend, who is compelled to follow Kharis and begins to age rapidly whenever she sees The Mummy (a far cry from anything in that first Kharis film). 

 

There is also not enough context to suggest Yousef could reasonably see the Mapleton college crew the same way Steve saw the Priests of Karnak, since, outside of Norman’s obsession with tana leaf study getting in the way of his wife asking him to go back to bed (of which Andoheb would most likely approve given his monologue about romantic attachments being forbidden), there is not nearly enough done to actually compare the college and the cult of Arkam.  That is completely fine because you would not come to the conclusion of them being similar without overthinking this remarkably simple and straightforward film.

 

As the quote at the top of this review says, the movie is very efficient, trimming any of the fat that might skew it in any other direction than just “quintessential Universal B horror movie,” so let’s just get into the actual review.

 

Review

 

Robert Lowery as Tom Hervey and Ramsay Ames as Amina Mansori lead this film as the third major pair of lovers in this tetralogy, but they are actually very refreshing and possibly the best couple so far.  Tom Hervey is a man of action like Steve that won’t hesitate to jump into action for his girl but also has enough of John’s clinical perceptiveness to not jump to conclusions and be able to accurately take in stimuli as it occurs (but not enough of John’s scientific nature to fully forget his girlfriend and get absorbed into study: most of Tom’s smartest moments are being able to understand and console Amina).  Amina, meanwhile, is naturally a bubbly and intelligent woman that keeps Tom on his toes with shared banter but harbors some mysterious secret that not even she seems to fully understand about Egypt and Kharis. 

 

The town somewhat stigmatizes Amina, through Tom’s college friend and possible roommate urging Tom to tactlessly press her on any question related to Egypt and the town and a newspaper clipping sensationalizing the fact that she, an Egyptian woman, might be involved in a Mummy crime, but Tom genuinely loves her and wants to know about Egypt because of her (rather than everyone else wanting to know more about her because of her connection to Egypt).  The film mines this relationship for effective drama, as we watch Tom try to salvage his relationship with the confused but still reciprocating Amina from circumstances neither one can control or understand.

 

Still set in Mapleton, this story interestingly has new leads but keeps the townsfolk or at least the idea of the townsfolk consistent.  As aforementioned, Professor Norman returns, after analyzing Kharis’ wraps in the previous film, and Mrs. Martha Evans is now a more significant character, with a husband Ben, and now the owner of Banning’s dog King (who, along with Tom’s dog Peanuts, is once again hostile to Kharis).  King gets to be one of the only characters to survive an actual fight with Kharis, while Ben is not so lucky.  Professor Norman repeats some version of the Steve + Babe role in Tomb where he is the main authority figure that gets murdered very quickly, but he actually takes us to some interesting places in terms of figuring out the overall morality of this series.

As I mentioned, he becomes obsessed with the tana leaves and their purported life extension (only academically though) to the point of extensive tests and study, even choosing to study them over his wife, and that gets him killed by Kharis, because he had finally cracked the code that it was 9 tana leaves required during the full moon to give immortality.  Norman will say that it only works during the full moon, which it won’t be after the night of his murder, but the film proceeds with all of Yousef’s later Kharis tana feedings successfully, likely indicating that Yousef’s prayers to the Amon-Ra directly impact this process in lieu of the moon.  Yousef’s prayers, despite being very successful, do not actually seem to work to control Kharis, who carries out his own agenda of seeking food and having one last fight with a Banning (King) on the way to his summons from Yousef. 

 

It is unclear whether or not Norman revived Kharis by melting his 9 tana leaves (in which case Kharis was lying dormant, which has not been established as an ability) or if Kharis was subsisting somehow on his own.  Andoheb does say that Kharis will never die because he has to protect Ananka eternally, which takes us to some interesting possibilities, because it begs the question why the High Priests keep feeding him the tana leaves if he can live years burnt all over without them.  I see two options. 

 

One is that this is an extension of the pattern I noticed where Andoheb (and now all priests of Arkam) are very irresponsible with the amount they give Kharis, and he only needed the initial dose to become immortal.  Going along with this, Norman’s scientific grounding explains his surprise that 9 leaves were required (he implicitly has never tried burning that much because he clearly values this near extinct resource far more than the priests do), so we have finally identified another part of what makes the Arkam priests unsustainable (the first being how treating relationships as taboo makes each of them more allured by the prospect).  The other option is very interesting and uses some of the previous canid symbolism. 

 

Is it possible, based on how Mehemet at least dehumanized Kharis and Andoheb ordered him around, that the priests of Arkam actually have been treating Kharis as a dog, essentially giving him treats intermittently so he’ll not only stick with them for more but also do tricks for them?  Kharis learns over the course of the films, wanting to kill Mehemet Bey for making Andoheb’s same mistake, and, in this film, Kharis has the most independence he has had after fending for himself, so the tragedy here is that Kharis is not actually a lapdog.  He is the untamed wolf, and the jackal, because they are the ones that sing for him.  Dogs, of which there are two significant ones in this film, hate Kharis because he is being treated as one but does not naturally have their loyalty since opposing the cult is what led to his curse in the first place (Tom’s mistaken guess as to why Peanuts is barking at one point is that he heard another dog barking and had to respond, so the film, even if jokingly, supports this interpretation).  Obviously, there are other ways to describe Kharis’ journey “from guardian to avenger to frustrated lover,” but I have always had trouble truly articulating how the Priests of Arkam can have the literal gods of this universe on their side yet also be so misguided, and this possible allusion explains some of that.

Kharis is a very active character in ways that I think are designed to go over the audience’s head upon a first viewing so that the surprise of his opposition to Yousef can still occur.  Once we break it down, Kharis primarily goes to Norman to feed and then finds Yousef, also to feed (which technically demonstrates a lack of independence except that there is implicitly some years since the previous movie during which time he has been fine, and it does not make sense at this point that he would choose not to take his favorite food).  Chaney’s performance is somewhat muted by virtue of the heavier makeup to simulate being in the much larger house fire (it baffles me that the one thing Universal always seems to take into account with continuity is that directly after a fire, the monster should look more burnt, but everything else, including character names is up for revision.  It’s a miracle that Karloff’s Bride of Frankenstein performance happened to be better than his original one, because this is a very easy way for Universal to shoot themselves in the foot, as this film shows). 

 

However, it seems clear based on the one limb he can use to express himself that in his scenes with Yousef, all he cares about is the tana fluid or Ananka tomb that he is directly grasping at.  Yousef happens to have the food he likes and a plan that will get them closer to Ananka; that is why he goes with him.  Yousef doesn’t order Kharis around the same way the previous masters did, and that should also indicate that things are different this time.  When Ananka turns out to be reincarnated rather than in the museum, Kharis has a tantrum and meltdown that only stops when Yousef promises they can still find Ananka.  Again, Yousef noticeably does not order Kharis to kill the night watchmen, because Kharis is thinking, not following orders.  (That will become important in Yousef’s final moments.)

 

After this point, discussion with another Egyptologist, Dr. Ayad from the museum, convinces law enforcement they should replicate Norman’s experiment to lure Kharis there and trap him in a hole, while Tom resolves to take Amina to his people in New York.  The framing of “his people” is interesting because one of Amina’s main worries is that she will not be accepted due to being Egyptian (since the Sheriff is making a very big deal of her connection to this crime that at least the characters involved think he wouldn’t if she weren’t Egyptian), and Tom assures her that his family is already planning to accept her as a Bride.  She is concerned and reticent, but Tom’s wit and romance is enough to comfort her.  Their kiss is broken off as it begins, an effective symbol for their relationship as a whole.  Tom consistently pronounces the dog’s name Peanuts without the proper enunciation and declares Peanuts to be her bodyguard for the night before they leave for New York.

Yousef, following prayers to Amon-Ra, does order Kharis to find Ananka, but Kharis does not leave until Yousef tells him how.  Meanwhile, Dr. Ayad figures out the 9 tana leaves bit with help from Mrs. Norman (previous films implied 3 leaf fluid was only administered to a sleeping Kharis only to keep his heart beating, so I see no issue here that any less than 9 would not register in experiments), and Dr. Ayad’s conduct in this experiment shows off a failing of Norman’s, in that Norman did this experiment without any help or safety, consumed by his obsession, while Ayad carries this out the scientific way.  The rational and scientifically minded John and Ayad are the characters these films think we should aspire to be.

 

Kharis starts to kidnap Amina, and “Ananka” is compelled to walk over to him and pass out, while Peanuts follows.  Tom also tries to find them, after Mrs. Blake alerts him (she also finds the Sheriff, complicating the Inspector’s plan that was involving the entire town at this point).   Peanuts guides Tom to the hiding place of Kharis and Yousef over a slow amount of time (the tension in this film isn’t slow moving Kharis, but the slow moving people trying to rescue his love from him).  Interestingly, it seems that Kharis chooses to bring Ananka back instead of going after the tana fluid.  

 

As Yousef is supposed to kill Amina, some disembodied voice tempts him to make her immortal and live with her forever.  Though I have speculation on the importance of this plot point, I do not necessarily like it because it implies the predatory actions of Andoheb, Mehemet and Yousef may not be of their own volition, but the film and Kharis’ story needed the otherwise asexual Yousef to gain this attraction, so it might as well happen this way.  Amina turns older before Yousef’s eyes, convincing him to give her tana leaf juice.  Kharis is very unhappy about this and attacks Yousef.  And here we see actual orders from Yousef that fail.  For the first time, someone checks the body of a murdered priest of Arkam, as Tom does not have the context that both the Mummy and John Carradine are bad guys.  We should remember that whatever voice reached Yousef, most likely a god, wanted Amina restored to youth and to live eternally.

 

With Tom knocked out by Kharis, Peanuts alerts the mob to Kharis’ location.  Kharis, holding Amina, incidentally outmaneuvers the entire mob by climbing down the lair as they climb up (or maybe he just is that intelligent), but Peanuts is persistent (and if they were going to have a dog be this important to the story, my speculation on the symbolism of dogs vs wolves in Kharis’ story is important since Peanuts and King never once betray their masters). 

 

Amina starts to age even more rapidly in Kharis’ arms, and I must also speculate that, because her tomb’s inscription mentioned she would have a second chance not definite forgiveness from the gods, the very abrupt temptation of Yousef was that chance for her to live again since otherwise she would ultimately age too fast and die again in Kharis’ presence (I know that the following film will go against this, but we have to first concern ourselves with what each film means and not the retcons that will come, since I do not recall the High Priests ever calling their cult Arkam before this film but now that is true).  The mob chases Kharis into a swamp, where he and a very ancient looking Ananka sink, presumably to their shared final resting place.  Everyone leaves the swamp except Peanuts, who sits and waits for Amina.

 

This is a rather dark ending, especially for this series, and that is probably the most unique part of this film from any other Universal B horror film.  It brings to mind the ending to House of Frankenstein, where a similar scenario played out, except there villain protagonist Dr. Nieman absolutely deserved his fate.  Here, every main character is helpless, either dead (in the case of Yousef, who has top billing), desiccated and possibly dead (Amina), unable to stop Kharis or bring themselves to stay by the swamp (Tom) or unable to stop Kharis or bring themselves to leave the swamp (Peanuts), except for Kharis, whose agency is the reason we are in this situation in the first place.  This ending has some good suspense because we are close enough to Kharis to understand possible reasons he chose this but not close enough to pin down the specific meaning, so that, upon a first watch, this climax could have reasonably gone in a lot of different directions.

 

Conclusion

 

The Mummy’s Ghost is a really stupid title for this movie (since, unlike The Ghost of Frankenstein, we do not see said Ghost), but I suppose there are options for what it could mean, each of which touching upon a different theme of the film.  When Kharis finds the corpse of Princess Ananka, he touches it, and it disintegrates while Amina wakes up in bed.  Obviously, Amina is Ananka brought back to life by the power of the gods, and she is as much a Mummy as Kharis is.  It is her ghost that stimulates her to become uncomfortable once it resurfaces, the ghost that is tied to Kharis.  However, I just said that she is as much a Mummy as Kharis is, a statement that goes both ways. 

 

This film is largely about Kharis gaining more independence, and he is the main character in the scene where Ananka’s body disintegrates as well as several other scenes.  The events of this story stimulate Kharis’ dormant and repressed ghost that initially rebelled against the celibacy of the cult which has now controlled him for 3,000 years.  It is frustrating but I think speaks to the thought that went into the film that this incredibly stupid title actually fits its own film the best so far in the Kharis saga (I have argued in the previous reviews that The Mummy’s Hand and The Mummy’s Tomb should have swapped titles to more accurately portray their subject matter).

 

If we are speaking in terms of creativity, I would say The Mummy’s Hand might be the best, and for ambition, The Mummy’s Tomb seems to have trail-blazed Slasher storytelling, but in terms of containing the least issues and most consistent product, The Mummy’s Ghost is that.  Again, this all depends most on how each of us views movies and how we appraise their quality, what flaws we notice and what merits we think counterbalance them.  My analysis here is by no means the final word on this tetralogy, within or outside of Plan9Crunch.  We all have different takeaways, and may the best argumentation win!

 

Due to the finality of not only this film’s ending but also of Kharis’ character arc and the Kharis and Ananka story, I almost wonder if this should have been only a trilogy.  For all its flaws, it’s a far more cohesive trilogy than Brendan Fraser’s Mummy films, and Griffin Jay and Henry Sucher (joined by Brenda Weisberg for this one) would not return to write The Mummy’s Curse, nor would Reginald Le Bord return to direct.  However, we cannot end this story here, since The Mummy’s Curse did come out pretty much immediately after this film in the same year of 1944, and it actually does end Kharis’ story.  We shall examine that one next time.  While you wait, I recommend you read our older review of The Mummy’s Ghost, linked above and also here: https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-mummys-ghost-is-lean-mean-universal.html .