The Mummy's Curse (1944)

Well, I thought that we might as well complete the set, so here we have the trailer for the last installment in Universal's Mummy series. (if you don't count Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy - which I don't - that is).  The Mummy's Curse (1944) picks up where the previous entry, The Mummy's Ghost (1944) left off.  Except, that the swamp that Kharis and the reincarnated Princess Ananka sank into in that film appears to have drifted South from New England to the Louisiana Bayou and some twenty years have apparently passed since that film's events.  Which means, of course, that it must be taking place in the future (relative to the time of the film's production).  A future that looks a lot like 1944, though.  In this future, developers are trying to drain that swamp, despite local fears that it is haunted by the ghosts of the mummy and his princess.  Inevitably, Kharis gets dug up and wanders off, representatives of the Priesthood of Arkam turn up with Tana leaves to try and bring him under their control and recover the Princess.  She also gets dug up and transforms into a young woman, albeit a different actress than in the previous film.

The usual shenanigans ensue, as Kharis rampages around strangling various locals in his search for the Princess, the priests fall out when one of them gets the hots for the revived Ananka and Kharis takes a dim of view of it all.  It climaxes with Kharis, quite literally, bringing the roof down on himself and the surviving priest.  The hero and heroine, meanwhile, find Ananka returned to her mummified state.  Which makes no sense at all: her mummified body had actually been destroyed in Mummy's Ghost, her soul transferring to the body of her American college girl reincarnation  - who was subsequently carried into the swamp by Kharis.  So her sudden mummification makes no more sense than the priests using Tana leaves to keep her alive.  The Mummy's Curse is an incredibly slow moving film, despite only running just over an hour, (even then it has to pad out this running time with flashbacks consisting of stock footage from The Mummy and The Mummy's Hand).  Unlike its predecessors, it doesn't seem to have inspired any of the plot elements in Hammer's 1959 remake of The Mummy.  Which isn't really surprising as it is itself little more than an uinspired rehash of elements from the previous entries in the series.  The fact is that by this time the series had well and truly run out of steam.  Whereas Universal's other horror properties extended their lives by combining into monster rallies like House of Frankenstein, (featuring Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster and Wolfman), Kharis steadfastly refused to play well with others.  (There had been an attempt to write him into the aforementioned monster mash of a movie, but this was abandoned early on - presumably his Egyptian origins were felt to jar too much with the Gothic middle European backgrounds of the other monsters).