Month: February 2020

The Pharaoh’s Curse (1957) 

IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 4.7/10 by 511 cinematizens.

Genre: Boring

Verdict:  Ibid.

The audience is restless and Captain Storm with no first name tries to tame it riding off into the Mojave desert with Miss Canfield.  Ziva appears and disappears into and out of nowhere which leads Storm to close questioning, but not as close as the fraternity brothers had hoped. 

Out there in the Burbank backlot they find …. sand, a lot of it. While all the accoutrements are allegedly British (see below for more on the accoutrementa) all of the principals are Yankee Doodle but at least they do not affect pretend-accents.  Storm is impossibly handsome but remains stiffly correct at all times with Miss Canfield.  

They find the diggers desecrating tombs and stealing, ah, exporting, ancient Egyptian artefacts, even a tomb with many dire threats in the cartouches that adorn it does not stop them.  The Europeans dismiss such superstition, but not the mandatory Egyptian present who goes all pale and wobbly like a Republican Senator getting orders from President Putin.   

By the osmosis of screenwriting the spirit of the long dead Pharaoh passes into the body of this Gypo who goes all mummy right down to the linen wraps and proceeds to drink blood, first from the horses then the Red Coats: Red Coats = red blood.  See, just like the aforementioned Senator: A bloodsucker. The stalwarts chase him around the one-set corridor as their number dwindles, along with any interest of viewers, to … the End.

After all the chasing Mummy is revealed to be wearing striped pyjamas!  No wonder he did was angry. Will no one respect the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the hotel burial chamber door?  The desecraters get their deserts, slurp, and then the swaddled Gypo retires, or something.

The medic says ‘eviscerated’ when he means ‘ex-sanguinated.’  The Brit uniforms in this 1902 setting are American WWII Army surplus. They venture into the trackless desert of Bronson Canyon on horses, not camels.  And so on and on.  There are able supporting actors in the cast like Ben Wright and Guy Prescott who have nothing to do.  It is a throwback in story and staging to 1940s curse of the Mummy films done so badly it is wonder it had a theatrical release in February 1957 in the same month that a mesmerising Seventh Seal opened.  How’s that for a comparison:  4.7 for this and 8.2 for the latter.  Even so, 4.7 seems way too high for something that cannot be watched, though reading the User Reviews on IMDb confirms my faith in the idiocracy.