The Mummy's Hand
Rating: 1.5/5
By: Nathaniel Simpson
The sequel to 1932's The Mummy should have worked very well, with Boris Karloff and director Karl Freund setting up the franchise very well for future filmmakers to craft sequels with. With 1940's The Mummy's Hand, it seems like the filmmakers and Universal sort of lost their way, making an incredibly slow and boring sequel that shouldn't even be considered part of the Mummy franchise.
The movie, which is directed by Christy Cabanne, follows archaeologist Steve Banning (Dick Foran) who unearths a vase that he believes will lead him to the tomb of the ancient Princess Ananka. Alongside his best friend and business partner Babe (Wallace Ford), they are able to get their expedition funded by amateur magician Solvani (Cecil Kellaway) to try and excavate the tomb. What they don't realize is that they are tunneling to the tunnel of the disgraced Kharis (Tom Tyler), whose secret is being kept by Steve's colleague Professor Andoheb (George Zucco). What was thought to be an expedition to uncover a tomb turns into a fight for survival against the ancient mummy.
The fatal flaw with this film, one that makes it nearly unrecognizable as a Universal Monster movie, is that it takes way too long to even set up the character and the true plot of the film. They don't even start digging to find the tomb until around forty-minutes in, and the movie only has a 67-minute runtime. Most of the movie feels concerned with trying to show off the comedic chemistry and timing of the two main leads, and the story really goes nowhere. If they wanted to make a movie with these two riffing off each other and adding in comedic jokes and gags, they shouldn't have picked a movie in the Mummy universe to craft this picture.
When the movies does get to the scenes with the mummy and him going on his rampage of terror, I think it does it as good as it can be. It does feel a little too late into the movie for him to be introduced as the main antagonist, but it does show the vision for this character the filmmakers had. The sequences as done quite well as it promises a mummy character going around and attacking the people at the excavation site, but I just wish they added more of this throughout the movie until waiting to the very end.
Concerning the characters in the film, I think the ensemble cast of actors do their best with what they are given. Foran and Ford obviously have wonderful chemistry together, and they are funny in certain scenes, especially Ford. Many of the scenes throughout the movie go on way too long and are way too unnecessarily wordy for a Monster film, but I don't think you should blame the actors for that. They were given these characters and they fill the roles in the best way possible, so they shouldn't be at fault for this movie failing. At the same time, Tyler as the titular antagonist does a great job under the wraps, and he's fun to watch for the brief period of time he is on screen.
The Mummy is one of the most iconic films in the Universal Monsters franchise, so it's quite a shame that the follow-up to it simply doesn't work very well at all. If they had crafted a spoof comedy that made fun of the Mummy character, I think it could have been a lot better with the material and the resources they were given. But, as a sequel to the movie that does so well to set up this universe where mummies come back alive, it's a very unfortunate and troublesome sequel.
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