the mummy

Famous Monsters Gone Off-Brand

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One of The Prytania’s Classic Movie selections this Halloween season was the 1958 Hammer Horror adaptation of Dracula, starring Christopher Lee as the famous vampire. It’s a gorgeous picture in the exact way that most Hammer Horrors are, but it’s also one that doesn’t take a lot of risks in its transformation from page to screen, to the point where its US release had to be retitled The Horror of Dracula in order to distinguish it from the decades-old Bela Lugosi classic from Universal. If anything, Hammer’s Dracula film goes out of its way to streamline and normalize the Bram Stoker source material, consolidating characters and skipping over the novel’s strange fixations on real estate deals & oceanic travel. As a result, I greatly enjoyed looking at The Horror of Dracula but didn’t think much about it after leaving the theater, since it deliberately made itself more inconspicuous so as not to be dismissed as a silly novelty. I believe this was a mistake. By the 1950s, the first run of the Universal Monster movies had established a concrete canon of iconic horror villains in Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, and the Gill-man (with no offense meant to my egomaniacal bestie the Invisible Man). Those famous creatures’ early outings in the Universal Monsterverse defined the look, feel, and tone of horror cinema (if not only by bringing some dark German Expressionist magic to Old Hollywood), so that any reiteration in subsequent decades would have to stand out as a silly novelty in order to stand out at all. Restaging Dracula in sumptuous 1950s Technicolor is not enough; you need a fun, memorable gimmick to zhuzh up the material. Even Universal knew that by the 1950s, when they regularly dispatched their Famous Monsters to terrorize Abbott & Costello in a series of slapstick comedies for children. And so, I left The Horror of Dracula craving the goofier, zanier side of Count Dracula in a novelty take on the character, and I’ve spent the rest of this Halloween season tracking down similar goof-offs from his Famous Monster brethren.

Of all the silly Dracula-adjacent novelties that called out to me this month, 1977’s Dracula’s Dog barked my name the loudest. In this far-afield deviation from the original novel, the Dracula surname has carried down through multiple generations all the way to Michael Dracula, a suburban dad who loves spending quality time with his middle-class family in sunny California. During an especially sun-dappled camping trip, Michael Dracula and the rest of the Dracula clan are attacked by a vampiric Doberman that once belonged to his ancestor, the Count Dracula of Dracula lore. The undead, ever-loyal Doberman attacks whomever has the misfortune of crossing his muzzle from scene to scene, but the real way he continues his former owner’s legacy is by biting and converting all nearby dogs into his canine vampire army, further ruining Michael Dracula’s family vacation on an escalating scale. You won’t be surprised to learn that Dracula’s Dog (aka Zoltan . . . Hound of Dracula) is not an especially well regarded addition to the Dracula canon, but I think that’s a shame. Anytime the hellhound Zoltan leapt out of his little doggie coffin to expose his bloody vampire fangs and gently nibble on his victims’ exposed necks, I experienced pure childlike delight, and that’s exactly what the Famous Monsters are good for. Sure, Zoltan and his loyal vampire-dog army trap Michael Dracula in a locked car and viciously attack him from all sides in a living-nightmare sequence straight out of Cujo, but any movie with the title Dracula’s Dog is going to feel like it was made for children, regardless of its content (a dissonance that director Albert Band would later push to further extremes with this son Charlie under the Full Moon home video brand). It’s not as controlled nor as respectable as the Hammer Horror take on Dracula, but it’s undeniably more memorable. You’ll never get the details of Dracula’s Dog mixed up with other Dracula adaptations in memory. For better or worse, it’s its own thing.

Maybe if the goofier, off-brand versions of Famous Monsters are going to primarily appeal to children, it’s best not to torment the little tykes with nightmare fuel like Dracula’s Dog; maybe the kiddos should just be pandered to. Universal realized this as early as their Abbott & Costello Meet The Monsters series in the 1940s & 50s, and they continued the tradition through the end of the millennium with another kiddie-friendly IP in 1999’s Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein. By then, the appeal of marketing directly to children was that their little brains are soft and malleable for advertisers, which is why this direct-to-video Frankencomedy doubles as a tourism ad for the Universal Studios theme park. You see, while Alvin and his band of chipmunk brothers are between rock gigs at Universal Studios, they discover that the real Dr. Frankenstein has also been employed by the park’s haunted house attraction and, of course, has released his lumbering undead creature into the wider park. Selling children on the timeless fun of the Chipmunks brand, the Famous Monsters brand, and the in-house amusement park brand, this disposable Halloween Season novelty is more a relic of shameless corporate synergy than it is a sincere addition to the Universal Frankenstein canon (even if its black & white opening positions it as a direct sequel in the James Whale lineage). By the time Alvin and the boys are performing a high-pitched Ozzy pastiche or rapping about fighting the monsters under their bed, however, the artistic merit of the project becomes a secondary concern. Much like Dracula’s Dog, it’s funny enough that it simply exists. Not for nothing, it also works as a great educational tool for young children who have not yet met everyone’s good friend Frankenstein and don’t know that he can be a big old sweetheart if you don’t treat him like a monster. Once loose, the creature quickly proves to just be a big, dumb kid, much like the suckers in the audience who begged their parents to buy this promotional video in the first place.

The next year’s follow-up, Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet The Wolfman, was a bit of a letdown in comparison to the Frankenstein one, but that disappointment can be a useful educational tool for children too. It sets healthy expectations for what kids will find when they’re old enough to watch the actual Universal monster movies; the Wolf Man is kind of a drip. 1973’s The Werewolf of Washington is aware of this, making sure that its lycanthropic protagonist is recognizable as a dipshit putz long before he’s bitten by a werewolf. Dean Stockwell stars as a Washington D.C. political reporter who’s sent on assignment to Eastern Europe, where he annoys the local yokels until one of them gets fed up and bites him during a full moon (while disguised in werewolf form, of course). Back in Washington, he becomes increasingly fraught & paranoid as he transforms into a werewolf himself, in what gradually reveals itself to be a caricature of Richard Nixon’s then-deteriorating mental state. If it had been released a few years later, The Werewolf of Washington might be understood as a parody of the era’s political paranoia thrillers like Three Days of the Condor or All the President’s Men. Instead, it’s just one of that genre’s goofier contemporaries, complete with very silly jokes about mixing up the words “pentagram” and “Pentagon,” among other groaner one-liners. And because Universal’s Wolf Man movie starring Lon Chaney Jr. established so much of the core iconography of the werewolf genre, it frequently pays homage to that specific iteration of werewolf lore, including fixation on the werewolf-smiting power of a silver-handled walking cane and its own low-budget recreation of Jack Pierce’s time-elapse makeup transformation effects. Like Dracula’s Dog, The Werewolf of Washington is both too preposterous to take fully seriously but also frequently too beautiful to dismiss as a throwaway novelty. Both movies are built on ridiculous premises, but they play them admirably straight for all they’re worth.

As much as the Wolf Man is a remarkably bad hang in the Universal Monsters crew, the Mummy is the biggest bummer of all. Most of the Mummy movies in that monster’s initial run are so punishingly boring that they’ve been forgotten to time entirely — their memories replaced with visions of Brendan Fraser & Rachel Weisz looking hot & sweaty in the big-budget desertscape of the late-90s reboot. The Mummy is the only Universal Monsters movie whose cultural memory has been surpassed by its derivatives’ and, as a result, most of the more prominent Mummy knockoffs are to be found in that late-90s era. Take for instance 1998’s ridiculously titled Bram Stoker’s The Mummy, a double-edged mockbuster of the then-upcoming Mummy remake and the long-cooled Bram Stoker’s Dracula, “starring” the third-billed actors from some of the 90s’ blandest sitcoms (Caroline in the City‘s Eric Lutes, Home Improvement‘s Richard Karn; Tubi is a truly magical place). Better yet, take 1999’s even more ridiculously titled The All New Adventures of Laurel & Hardy in For Love or Mummy: an Ernestless outing from Jim Varney collaborator John Cherry, improbably cashing in on the era’s Mummy revival by resurrecting Laurel & Hardy from the dead to star in their own Abbott & Costello Meet the Monsters comedy. Now that’s what off-brand Famous Monster movies are all about. Never at any point in For Love or Mummy‘s runtime do you believe that it exists or that you’re spending your precious time on this Earth watching it. It’s also, admittedly, pretty funny. “Laurel” (Bronson Pinchot) & “Hardy” (Gailard Sartain) fit right into the Dumb & Dumber mold of the era’s comedic sensibilities, landing easy laughs as they prattle & pratfall their way through their run-in with a magically resurrected Egyptian mummy. The mummy itself has a pretty cool design to it too, even if it is a remarkably stupid one. The head from a sarcophagus is propped up on a traditionally-bandaged mummy body like a giant papier-mâché mask in an image that would feel more at home in a Saturday morning cartoon than in live action. It’s just the right kind of dumb.

The knockoff Gill-man movies of the 1960s are even dumber. During the era’s beach-party craze, the latecomer Universal Monster was resurrected for two cult-classic creature features in 1964’s The Horror of Party Beach & 1965’s The Beach Girls and the Monster. Together, they teach the ultimate lesson to studios like Hammer and, more recently, the failed grim-dark Universal Monsterverse reboots: have fun. It turns out that making movies is easy. All you need to do is pay some twentysomethings to dance in bikinis to surf rock and point the camera in the right direction. The only hard part, really, is convincing them to also let you pour chocolate syrup on them while getting pawed at by a man in a rubber suit; it sounds sketchy out of context. The monsters in these two beach-party monster movies are both instantly recognizable as direct descendants of the Gill-man. More specifically, the one in The Beach Girls and the Monster looks like a child’s crayon drawing of the Gill-man (complete with goofily round eyeballs) and the one in The Horror of Party Beach looks like a wax figure of the Gill-man that has melted in the beachside sun, but they’re both honorary Gill-men all the same. The Horror of Party Beach even goes the extra mile by including some underwater cinematography in wimpy homage to the original Creature from the Black Lagoon, demonstrating in time-elapse photography how fish DNA, human skeletons, and nuclear waste have mixed to create its not-quite-Gill-man creature. The resulting monster looks a little like if Big Bird’s cousin was a fish and his only known photo was taken at the height of a hotdog eating contest. Then, the goofy beach party fun goes sour during his routine monster attacks, wherein the chocolate-syrup blood looks shockingly brutal in black & white contrast. The Beach Girls and the Monster puts less effort into its own monster mayhem, but it hits just about every other entertainment metric you would want out of a so-called Bad Movie. Its performances are perfectly stilted, its knockoff Gill-man is perfectly doofy, and anytime they’re not sure what to do between kills everyone starts aggressively go-go dancing to surf rock & stock footage. Perfection.

None of these Famous Monster knockoffs are nearly as handsome nor as respectable as the Hammer Horror adaptation of Dracula, but they’re all much more memorably bizarre. Why make Dracula’s tactics & motivations more logical & methodical when you could also choose to mount him on a surfboard while bikini babes go-go dance on a nearby beach, cheering him on? The original run of Universal Monster movies are not only perfect pieces of pop art, but they’re also warm, unrepeatable introductions to cinephiles’ best friends. We’ve already met Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and Gill-man in their prime, and we’ll always primarily remember them as they were in that black & white heyday. So, my impulse with their later films is to watch my ghoulish friends have a little fun. Let them enjoy time with their family pets or get into buffoonish mishaps with the biggest dum-dums within striking distance. There’s no need to take any of this kiddie stuff at all seriously. Now, please remember to excuse my hypocrisy when I fall in love with Robert Eggers’s super-serious “werwulf” picture next month, negating everything I just said.

-Brandon Ledet

The Mummy (1999)

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Recently, Brandon wrote a piece about the unfortunate position of The Mummy as Universal’s most side-lined classic horror character, and how the general public’s association of the title The Mummy with the 1999 action-adventure film directed by Stephen Sommers rather than the Karl Freund original cements The Mummy as a second-tier hanger-on. During the umpteenth viewing of the trailer for the upcoming release of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a friend of mine leaned over to me in the theater and asked me a question about the frequency of these remakes, and I mentioned my own framework of the understanding about why The Mummy (the character) rarely works. Namely, you can make a movie about Wolfmen, Invisible Men, reanimated Promethei, and Dracula (et al) without the text being, necessitated by its nature, inherently racist. The Northern Hemisphere positively plundered Egypt and its historical sites, and the ongoing behavior of the British Museum acting in miniature on behalf of the colonialist experiment demonstrates that they are pathologically unable to comprehend the extent of the evil and shame inherent in their “expeditions.” Mummies were ground up into powder and used for paint pigmentation, medicine, and countless other things, again with Britain nationally acting as the microcosm of colonialist enterprise by rushing headlong into turning other people’s ancestors, a finite resource indeed, into a monetized enterprise. That’s why no big-budget mummy movie in the 21st century has actually been about a mummy; they’ve been about death gods creating avatars for themselves (the 2017 Tom Cruise film) or a child being possessed by something after spending some time in a sarcophagus (the new Lee Cronin film, at least based on the trailer). 

The last time that a Mummy was about a mummy was in 1999, when Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz memetically lit the libidos of bisexuals worldwide ablaze. Fraser plays Rick O’Connell, an American in interbellum Egypt for unknown reasons, whom we meet making a final stand against presumed locals while defending(?) some ruins. It’s a big guns-blazing action sequence that doesn’t really want you to ask questions about why Rick’s there, whose territory is rightfully whose, or other questions about the “veiled protectorate” period. Meanwhile in Cairo, Weisz’s Evelyn clumsily destroys a lot of priceless texts before her gadabout brother Jonathan (John Hannah) presents her with an artifact he pickpocketed that supposedly came from the lost city of Hamunaptra, a legendary treasure repository as well as “the city of the dead.” Evelyn, Rick, and Jonathan set out to find the city again, and find themselves in a race to the lost city with Beni (Kevin J. O’Connor), a cowardly man who was previously at Hamunaptra at the same time as Rick, and the American cowboys he’s guiding along the same path. Upon arrival, the Americans almost immediately release the undead ancient Egyptian priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), who was mummified alive as a punishment for touching the Pharaoh’s concubine, from his tomb, unleashing plagues and the potential to end the world. 

I used to love this movie. I was in middle school when both it and its sequel were released, and as a kid who had grown up obsessed with Indiana Jones and with an interest in Egyptology, this was an exciting mash-up of horror and action-adventure that really hit my sweet spot. It also didn’t hurt that there were large swathes of time when it was on cable almost constantly, so it really left a mark on me. Going back to it now, however, I can’t help but find it a little distasteful, and a product of its time. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in the person of Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr), a character descended from a long line of secret defenders of the pharaonic order. Despite living a life that implies an ongoing belief in the Egyptian pantheon of old, Ardeth praises Allah, something that was uncommon but unremarkable among heroic characters in films of the period but would become contentious just a couple of years later during the era of kneejerk American Islamophobia. Ardeth is also not played by an Egyptian actor (Fehr was born in Tel Aviv), nor is Imhotep (Vosloo is white South African), nor are the pharaoh (Aharon Ipalé is Israeli) or his Anck-su-namun (Patricia Velásquez is Venezuelan). The casting of the roles in the film outside of our white leads is classic Hollywood “brown is brown” racism of a bygone era, and watching this as an adult who is fully conscious of all of the implications greatly dulls one’s enthusiasm for what is, otherwise, an adventurous romp. 

A lot of the CGI here will look dated to the modern eye, even to those of us who remember this as being an extravaganza of realist effects. A lot of it still works because its uncanniness can be excused as a matter of course for a horror flick, but the CGI Thebes stands out as particularly video game-esque. The rewatch of this was prompted by the upcoming release of the aforementioned Lee Cronin Mummy, but the timing happened to align with Passover having recently happened, and I realized I had always thought of this as a kind of Passover movie, a secular alternative to The Ten Commandments that also happened to contain the plagues. (Toads and frogs are one of the ones that are left out, presumably because every amphibian wrangler in Hollywood was working on Magnolia at the time.) Preteens, like I was when I first saw it, are really the best demographic for this film, as its overwritten corny dialogue and telegraphed acting choices read like a throwback to old-timey pictures, until you’ve watched as many of them as I have and realize it’s more shallow parody than homage. Weisz and Fraser are sexy, yes, and they have great chemistry together, but Rick is much more of an asshole than I remember, and Evey, with her clumsy awkwardness and frustration at Cambridge’s rejection of her despite her outsized genius, feels like a fanfiction character, right down to her being a nepo baby. 

I wish that I could love this one as much as I did when I was younger, but most of the enjoyment that can be derived from it now comes at the film’s expense. If you have fond memories of it, let that sleeping dog lie; don’t go disturbing the sarcophagus of your memory.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Famous Monster B-Lister: The Mummy

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It may just be a marketing term coined by fans, but the existence of Universal’s “Famous Monsters” brand suggests that there must also be a Famous Monsters B-List. Every celebrity industry has its own power-rankings hierarchy, with public-figure colleagues competing amongst themselves for job opportunities and name recognition. Within Universal’s early horror successes from the 1930s through the 1950s, the C-List is easy to define, as it’s mostly made up of semi-literary characters who get excluded from the nostalgic posters and action figures celebrating the brand: Mr. Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, the bitchy little freaks Lugosi & Karloff play in The Black Cat, etc. Differentiating the B-List from the A-List is more of a case-by-case judgement call. To me, the official roster of Universal’s Famous Monsters can be cleanly split in half. The A-List celebrity monsters are Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. They’re the ones who most often cross-pollinate each other’s sequels, and they’re the ones whose likeness you’re most likely to see on generic Halloween decorations year after year. That leaves The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon as B-List celebrity monsters, the ones whose numerous sequels and knockoff plastic masks collect dust on the shelf while the A-List monsters get to run wild in the streets every October into perpetuity.

The most curious case of B-List monster celebrity has got to be The Mummy, since his first appearance in the lineup immediately followed the success of Universal’s Frankenstein & Dracula, a decade before The Wolf Man. The problem is that the poor walking corpse spent his entire career following Frankenstein & Dracula’s heavy footsteps, never truly becoming his own thing. 1932’s The Mummy was penned by John L. Balderson, who is most famous for writing the 1924 stage play version of Dracula that starred Bela Lugosi and was eventually adapted to the screen by Tod Browning, kicking off the Universal Monsters brand. Balderson was seemingly going through the motions in his secondary contribution to the canon, writing yet another story of a foreign-born romantic ghoul who uses his evil powers of hypnosis to woo a young woman he believes to be the reincarnation of his one true love. Only, that archetype is instead played here by Lugosi’s career-long professional rival Boris Karloff, whose monstrous figure is most closely associated with Frankenstein’s monster, further minimizing The Mummy as a Famous Monsters footnote. Stuck between the lecherous behavior of one A-List Famous Monster and the walking-corpse physicality of another, The Mummy was destined to be relegated to the horror celebrity B-List, to the point where his initial onscreen outing is often confused for details from its various sequels & spoofs.

The Mummy pictured in the Universal Monsters branding never appears onscreen in 1932’s The Mummy; that’s a mummy of a different name. At the start of the picture, Karloff’s mummified Egyptian sorcerer Imhotep does appear wrinkled & bandaged as another monster creation from legendary make-up artist Jack Pierce, who also crafted the actor’s more famous look in Frankenstein. We just never see him moving outside the confines of his sarcophagus while wearing that get-up. After dismissing ancient curses warning against it as Egyptian “mumbo jumbo,” some naive archeologists invade Imhotep’s tomb to pilfer cultural artifacts for career-making museum exhibits, mistakenly activating the long-dormant loverboy’s corpse by reading the forbidden scrolls he was buried with aloud. Once awakened, Imhotep immediately leaves his tomb & rags behind to work on reclaiming his lost love through ancient magic spells, transforming from a dried up corpse to a mildly disconcerting gentleman with sun-damaged skin and glowing, hypnotic eyes. We never get to witness this bodily transformation, nor is there any shot of Karloff schlepping around in the famous mummy rags before putting on a more respectable fez-and-robe ensemble. The mummy’s walk out of his tomb is left mostly to the audience’s imagination, as the movie is more of a classy mood-setter than it is a proper creature feature. It leaves that cheap business to its many sequels, headlined by an entirely different mummy.

Although its many sequels frequently repurpose footage from the flashbacks to the undead Imhotep’s days as a living priest and self-proclaimed King of the Gods, they immediately swap him out for a new mummy named Kharis. Since the first of Universal’s Mummy films only has a couple shots of its titular monster in the iconic bandages, the sequels have to start over and dream up something more recognizable (i.e., more marketable) without relying on the familiarity of Boris Karloff’s mug. Weirdly, that leaves the 1940 follow-up The Mummy’s Hand both more archetypal and lesser seen than the original film it was tasked to rework. Getting ahead of the next decade’s trend of pairing Universal’s Famous Monsters with Abbott & Costello, The Mummy’s Hand already stars two over-their-heads Brooklyn goofballs who get into a scrape with the famous monster. The out-of-place American archeologists are desperate for a big score while shopping the markets of Egypt, where they again ignore locals’ warnings & curses and pry open the tomb of a long-dormant mummy, in this case Kharis. Again, that mummy is liberated from his sarcophagus and immediately seeks to reconnect with his supposedly reincarnated soul mate, but this time he never ditches the rags. This is where the image of The Mummy skulking around in full uniform is born, finally becoming his own thing (even if actor Tom Tyler plays him like Karloff’s Frankenstein with a bum leg).

Once Universal found a mummy they could market in Kharis, the rest of the sequels can only work to boost his stats to match the more formidable figures of Dracula, Frankenstein, and newcomer hotshot The Wolf Man. 1942’s The Mummy’s Tomb further legitimizes The Mummy by dressing up Lon Chaney, Jr. in the make-up for an otherwise pointless sequel, which is essential to the brand (see also: Son of Dracula, The Ghost of Frankenstein, and the many appearances of Lawrence Talbot, a.k.a. The Wolf Man). Then, it proceeds to delegitimize the Mummy by further developing him into a blurry photocopy of Frankenstein’s monster; Kharis giveth, Kharis taketh away. Not only does Kharis start to carry around his unconscious, reincarnated loves with the exact posture of Karloff’s Frankenstein, but he’s also brought to a fiery end by an angry mob at the film’s climax, directly alluding to James Whale’s visual iconography. 1944’s The Mummy’s Ghost continues that work by finally giving Kharis an official Bride of Mummy counterpart, complete with the white streaks of hair at the temples in the unmistakable style of Elsa Lanchester. At this point in the series, the perils of reckless archeology are no longer a concern. Once Kharis reaches American soil in Tomb & Ghost, the series fixates on red-blooded American men protecting their women from the corrupting forces of seductive foreigners. The most impressive thing about Ghost is that it commits to the bit in a shocker ending, finally allowing The Mummy to successfully steal away his reincarnated love, sinking into the swamp with her dangling in his arms as her body rapidly ages to close their centuries-scale age gap in mere seconds.

There’s some incredibly shameless runtime padding in The Mummy’s Tomb, starting off an hour-long sequel with over ten minutes of “Previously on . . .” recapping before setting The Mummy loose on American soil.  It’s an instructive reminder that these sequels were produced before the invention of home video and, subsequently, VHS rental stores. Since audiences couldn’t easily rewatch a classic movie on a whim, the studios would just remake that same movie again and again to scratch that itch, as a matter of routine. The later Mummy sequels have no interest in being their own thing; they just take the same old Mummy out for a walk. Even the choice to relocate Kharis to Cajun swamp country in 1944’s The Mummy’s Curse affords the series little novelty outside the amusement of hearing Old Hollywood’s goofy misinterpretations of the Cajun-French accent. The Mummy started as Egyptian Dracula in his first outing. Then, he gradually, improbably became New England Frankenstein. For his last trick, he emerges as Cajun Swamp Thing. He’s a true international playboy, seducing a new woman at each stop along the way, including a choice to leave The Bride of Mummy behind here in favor of a new The Mummy’s Princess love interest (future Folgers Coffee spokeswoman Virginia Christie, who looks incredibly hip here with some Bettie Page bangs). Even the novelty of seeing The Mummy trudge along in a swampy locale isn’t especially distinct to this famous monster, though, considering that Lon Chaney, Jr. had already appeared there in the previous year’s Son of Dracula (under the hilarious pseudonym Count Alucard). That’s not even getting into the obvious concerns of what would happen if you dragged your dried-out mummy through a humid swamp. The whole enterprise is one big afterthought.

Of course, the final indignity for all of Universal’s Famous Monsters is to officially sanction Lou Costello’s buffoonery, which The Mummy was tasked to do in 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. It’s here that the Mummy, forever following in Frankenstein & Dracula’s footsteps, has finally Made It. Even so, he’s way late to the party, taking his turn with the comedy duo after they already met Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll & Mister Hyde, and “The Killer, Boris Karloff” in similarly titled comedies. Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was the very last of the comedians’ onscreen run-ins with Universal’s Famous Monsters, as it also marked the end of their overall contract with Universal Pictures. There are a few stray laughs scattered throughout the picture—mostly catering to fans of “mummy”/”mommy” puns—but the bit had very obviously been exhausted before The Mummy’s number was called, and it feels like just as much of a tired exercise as proper Mummy sequels like The Mummy’s Curse. None of the later Mummy films are especially great, but they are all mercifully short, and by the time you meet up with anyone for the sixth or seventh time they start to become your friend, so it’s fun to see him goof around in this final outing. It’s just that The Mummy is more like your work friend, whereas Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man are true buds you look forward to seeing on the weekend.

Like most horror franchises that stumble past their obvious expiration date, The Mummy’s initial outing is a great film in its own right, and its numerous, goofy follow-ups are only made endearing by their familiarity and nostalgic value. There’s nothing iconic about The Mummy’s lore, really. His tana-leaves medicine regimen, crime-scene contaminating mold, and smoky flashback pool have all been forgotten to time, as opposed to other Universal-specific details like Dracula’s hypnotic hand gestures or the bolts on Frankenstein’s neck. The Famous Monsters roster would feel thin & incomplete without him, but he’s mostly a background player. The biggest claim to modern fame for The Mummy is that its 1999 remake is by far the most success Universal has had in its attempts to revitalize its Famous Monsters brand for new generations. It succeeded where fellow studio titles like Renfield, Van Helsing, and Dracula Untold have failed. Even so, that accomplishment only further cements the original Mummy in a B-List status. When someone references the movie The Mummy in conversation, most people immediately picture Brendan Fraser, not Boris Karloff. The audience who remembers any of the Kharis titles in the series—Hand, Tomb, Ghost, Curse—is shrinking every year, despite that version of the monster being the one that appears on all of the throwback posters & Funko Pop boxes. Meanwhile, cinematic references to Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man immediately conjure the likeness of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr., which is what makes them official Famous Monster A-Listers. Everyone else is just lucky to be on the guest list.

-Brandon Ledet