The Mummy's Hand (1940)

The Mummy's Hand (1940) is interesting as, rather than being either a straight remake or sequel to The Mummy (1932), it is an early example of what would nowadays be called a 'reboot'.  By the 1940s, although Universal had become the undisputed kings of horror with their monster pictures, these had mainly focused on Frankenstein (or rather his monster) and, to a lesser extent, Dracula (and his various offspring).  Attempts to create new monsters had been largely unsuccessful, never spawning a series, (Werewolf of London, Invisible Man and yes, The Mummy all come to mind).  The problem being that none of them really lent themselves to sequels, their stories being entirely self-contained and their conclusions allowing little wriggle room for resurrections of their titular monsters).  So, by the forties, Universal was looking for ways to create new monster-based series, (they were still tying to create the odd new monster - Man Made Monster (1941) springs to mind), and started to look back at these old properties to see how they could exploit them and make them sequel friendly.  The answer, generally, was to simplify their underlying concepts, making them more pulp-like and cheaper to produce.  The Invisible Man Returns (1940), for instance, replaces the original's crazed anti-hero, with his murderous sprees as he attempts to put into motion his deranged plans, with a more conventional hero using his invisibility to try and prove his innocence when wrongly accused of murder.  The Wolfman bucked the trend somewhat by providing its protagonist with a more detailed mythology to both explain and resolve his lycanthropy than had existed in Werewolf of London, but simultaneously simplified his story line.  

The Mummy's Hand, despite incorporating a fair amount of cost-cutting stock footage from The Mummy for the flashbacks to Ancient Egypt, represents the most radical reworking of its progenitor.  While the Boris Karloff starring original was a rather slow moving and often dull tale, stretches of which are remarkably similar to Universal's earlier Dracula (1930), (even down to casting Edward Van Sloan, Van Helsing to Lugosi's Dracula, in a similar role, The Mummy's Hand is far more action-orientated.  Most crucially, while The Mummy quickly dispenses with its title monster, Karloff's Im Ho Tep wandering off into the Egyptian night after being accidentally revived, to re-emerge, unbandaged,  as sophisticated, but mysterious, historian Ardeth Bey, the 1940 film's mummy, Kharis, remains both wrapped and murderous for the entire film.  While the 1932 film had lacked any stranglings by living mummys, The Mummy's Hand is chock full of them.  The new movie also simplified the means of reviving the mummy, substituting life-giving tana leaves for the life giving Scroll of Thoth.  It also plays down the reincarnation themes of the original, (which, to be fair, had nothing to to with Egyptian mythology, anyway), although these resurfaced in the sequels. With the the reincarnation schtick dropped, the plot is simplified to simply be one of the Priests of Karnak using a a living mummy to protect the tomb of Princess Ananka and destroy those seeking to desecrate it.  

Clearly, all these changes worked, as The Mummy's Hand proved to be a considerable hit for Universal, spawning no less than three sequels, (which replaced Tom Tyler with Lon Chaney Jr in the title role), despite the ending leaving the High Priest filled full of lead and Kharis a smouldering pile of bandages.  Interestingly, it, rather than the Boris Karloff film, has provided the template for most subsequent mummy films.  (When Hammer remade The Mummy in 1959, they combined elements from all of the Universal films, but took the character names and basic plot from The Mummy's Hand, albeit with the reincarnation angle retained from the original).  When people think of  'The Mummy', it is usually The Mummy's Hand that they think of, with its blacked out eyes and shuffling gait, chasing the heroes through a crumbling tomb.  Seen today, the thing that most stands out about The Mummy's Hand is that, despite a running time of just over an hour, it takes an age to actually get to any real mummy action.  Most of the running time seems to be taken up with flashbacks, exposition by various High Priests, adventures in the bazaar, followed by adventures in the desert and far too much comic relief from Wallace Ford and Cecil Kellaway.  But if you can sit through all that, you'll be rewarded with a frenzied final ten to fifteen minutes in which a surprisingly menacing, not to mention apparently unstoppable, Kharis lurches around throttling anyone he can get his hands on.  Some of the effects which accompany this brief rampage - the blacked out eyes and the clouds of dust that emanate from Kharis when he is struck - are impressive and add to the nightmarish feel of the climax.