Having located the lost tomb of Ra-Antef the team of archaeologists and Egyptologists (Jack Gwillim, Ronald Howard & Jeanne Roland) bring the plundered remains back to Britain where their brash American financier (Fred Clark) plans to exhibit the mummy as part of a touring show. Unfortunately there is the inevitable curse and their journey home is dogged by murder, mayhem and an enigmatic stranger (Terence Morgan) all of which they seem to take entirely in their stride.
By the mid 60s Hammer Films were releasing around half a dozen movies a year so it's inevitable that there's some slippage in quality amongst them. The studio's second mummy movie, bereft of Hammer's A-team of Cushing and Lee who've been replaced, for the most part, with a cast of unremarkable, jobbing actors, is a mess of cliches and contrivances that bumbles along entirely forgetting to unleash the Mummy until well over halfway through the film. Indeed, 'The Curse...' is such a stinker that the absurdity of the revelation in the final act is entirely predictable and it almost never fails to make me laugh every tme I get to it but it has some nice set pieces and the finale in the sewers is effectively done offering an unusual grandeur and a much needed change of setting.
Mummy movies are a tricky prosect to pull off - implacable, shuffling, encroaching murder monsters work so much better as a zombie hoard - and it takes some real filmic flair to pull it off which this movie has very little of as it's as slow, lumbering and wheezy as its monster but still, for all it's many faults, I like it and it's long been a rainy day movie at Wyrd Manor.
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