1956's "Pharaoh's Curse" at first looks to be a simple 50s update of The Mummy, and certainly better than its current DVD cofeature "Curse of the Faceless Man." The screenwriter was Richard Landau, responsible for quite a few genre titles: "Lost Continent," "Stolen Face," "Spaceways," "The Glass Tomb," "The Quatermass Xperiment," "Voodoo Island," and "Frankenstein-1970." The production team of Aubrey Schenck and Howard W. Koch were also responsible for "The Black Sleep," "Voodoo Island," "Frankenstein-1970," and "X-15," but were more prolific at Westerns, action and crime dramas. At the helm was director Lee 'Roll 'Em' Sholem, no stylist but an efficient craftsman whose only other genre credits included "Tarzan's Magic Fountain," "Tarzan and the Slave Girl," "Superman and the Mole Men," "Jungle Man-Eaters," "Cannibal Attack," "Doomsday Machine" and "Tobor the Great." Set in 1902 Egypt, a party of four march into the desert to find the expedition of noted archaeologist Robert Quentin (George N. Neise), who hope to uncover the tomb of Pharaoh Ra-Antef without government authority. The opening reels are a tough slog, watching this quartet lose a horse, food, and water before the film shifts focus to Quentin's forbidden discovery, which naturally bears a curse declaring that the spirit of the Pharaoh's high priest will take the form of another to ingest human blood. Native guide Numar (Alvaro Guillot) becomes the victim of possession, aging rapidly in a matter of hours before stalking anyone stupid enough to venture alone inside the tomb (the best moment has his arm pulled off by the hero, as the ghoul's entire body is disintegrating into dust). It's not executed particularly well (only two blood drained murders), but the performers acquit themselves nicely (excusing the multiple accents) and the idea of merging the Mummy with the vampire legend would recur exactly ten years later in "Beast of Morocco." Another interesting touch is making the archaeologist an unsympathetic glory hound, hardly batting an eye when his wife announces the end of their marriage. Theatrically double billed by United Artists with Karloff's "Voodoo Island," the poster's ballyhoo gives away the entire mystery: "a blood-lusting mummy that kills for a cat-goddess!" The one actor with previous experience on Egyptian findings was Kurt Katch, who was a casualty of both "The Mummy's Curse" and "Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy" (he meets a similar fate here). Terence De Marney was feted to work opposite both Bela Lugosi (1935's "Phantom Ship") and Boris Karloff (1965's "Die, Monster, Die!"), before playing a denizen of darkness himself in the aforementioned "Beast of Morocco," a better take on the subject if still a slow moving affair (interestingly, the British thespian would find himself a staple of TV Westerns).
Review of Pharaoh's Curse
