The Mummy's Tomb (1942)

This movie starts out with about ten or twelve minutes devoted to recapping the events of the prior film, The Mummy's Hand. I hadn't seen something like that since watching Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2.

This one is supposed to be taking place thirty years after that film, which if it took place in 1940, places this one in 1970. No effort is made to make it appear to be set in the future, apart from aging the characters from the first movie.

In The Mummy's Hand, Babe shoots four shots at point-blank range into an Egyptian High Priest, who then falls down a long flight of stone steps. Even though we are shown this clip, later in the movie we see that priest as an older man, initiating his son, the way he'd be initiated in The Mummy's Hand. He claims he'd only been shot once, in the arm. Yeah, right.

The Mummy is also back, after having been shot at and burned in the prior film. The only difference seems to be that he has no eyes now (I'm not sure how he gets around, maybe by sound like The Blind Dead, who director Amando de Ossorio thought of as mummies, not zombies?). He's got old bandages wrapped around him. His old bandages should have burned, so presumably he was re-wrapped with old bandages (since if new ones were used, he wouldn't be as scary). Additionally, while Kharis needed to have potions of Tana leaves planted on the premises of people he was supposed to kill in the last film, here he can be sent out without that.

The young Egyptian gets a job as a cemetery caretaker in America, where the Banning family lives, so he can set the mummy on them for having violated Princess Annanka's tomb. He doesn't seem to have any plans to try to get her or her treasures back from the museum, which is never seen. He seems set on killing the Bannings, apparently not knowing about Babe - who had shot his father! He only goes after Babe after Babe shows up and figures out the mummy is back, and the priest overhears him. Likewise, the priest doesn't seem to know or care about finding out what happened to the magician and his daughter. The daughter, we learn, died, but the priest never hears that. The magician, I suppose, disappeared.

This Egyptian priest, like his father before him, and like Kharis before them, falls in love with a woman who does not have any feelings for him. Like his father, he uses the mummy to try to retrieve her.

Seeing the mummy hobbling about in suburban American neighborhoods seemed fairly absurd. It would have been easier for the priest to go into the homes of the people he wanted dead and shoot them! Also absurd is the point at which all the townspeople go hunting for the mummy with torches! Would anybody in 1970s American be able to produce and light a torch at a moment's notice, like nineteenth century European villagers in a Frankenstein movie? They also start to burn a house down to get the mummy, thinking nothing of destroying the house. They don't try to kill him in a more efficient way, and seem to give no thought to the welfare of the mummy's captive. Some also try shooting him when he is struggling with someone, giving no thought to the bullets passing right through him. Of course, no one is harmed. Additionally, while the mummy seems afraid of fire, torches are thrown at him to no effect, and he also walks through fire a few times without burning.

Overall, this is a pretty flawed movie. Still, watching it was sort of fun, and it's hard to dislike a classic Universal monster movie.