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"He who robs the graves of Egypt dies," an immemorial dictum richly illustrated. The British archeologist (Felix Aylmer) enters the tomb of the princess, a green tinge hovers over gold and stone, he reaches for the Scroll of Life and a portal opens and when next seen his mind is broken. His son (Peter Cushing) returns home, marked for death by the devout local (George Pastell) who vows to avenge the desecration. "The powers with which you have meddled do not rest easy," thus the titular infidel-slayer rising out of the swamp, the high priest (Christopher Lee) punished millenniums ago for "the ultimate blasphemy." (The flashback of painstaking embalming rites expands the DeMille sadism with beheaded virgins and sliced tongues.) Terence Fisher replaces the transcendent connections of Freund's original with colonial anxiety (The Stranglers of Bombay is the companion piece), Lee's towering, lurching fiend is his own arresting pantomime—elongated like a Giacometti, eyeballs staring through slits, bandages crusted with mud and torso adorned with holes from shotgun blasts. Fin de siècle England is a tasteful parlor with its doors suddenly smashed open in an image from The Thing from Another World, the inspector (Eddie Byrne) insists on "facts, not fantasies straight out of Edgar Allan Poe." The most charged sequence has Cushing's arrogant explorer trying to bait Pastell's seething cultist, a debate of faith and occupation in a lavish living room a few feet away from a locked chamber hiding altar and sarcophagus. The rampage is interrupted by the sight of the wife (Yvonne Furneaux) who's the spitting image of the mummy's lost love, it all circles back to the mire for the slave to beauty. "There are certain things for which civilization has no answer." With Raymond Huntley, Michael Ripper, George Woodbridge, Harold Goodwin, and Denis Shaw.
--- Fernando F. Croce |