Curse of Kah-to-Bey

THE MUMMY'S SHROUD (1967)

South African non-actress Maggie Kimberly escapes the clutches of Eddie Powell in Hammer's third Mummy picture. 

MEZZERA, Egypt, 1920: a British archaeological expedition financed by businessman Stanley Preston (John Phillips) - comprising of Sir Basil Walden (Andre Morrell), Preston's son Paul (a stilted David Buck), photographer Harry Newton (Tim Barrett) and psychic linguist Claire de Sangre (Maggie Kimberly) - discover the tomb of Kah-to-Bey, a child prince. Members of the find are soon being murdered by the Mummy of Prem (played by Hammer's regular stuntman and Christopher Lee double Eddie Powell), Kah-to-Bey's devoted servant, who can be revived by reading the words off the Prince's burial shroud.

Following Terence Fisher's magisterial THE MUMMY of 1959 and Michael Carreras' disposable 1964 THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, THE MUMMY'S SHROUD ("Beware the Beat of the Cloth-wrapped feet!") is a formulaic affair, and the last movie shot at Bray. Written and directed by John Gilling, and scripted by Anthony Hinds, the film starts with a painfully dull and micro-budgeted ancient Egyptian prologue - which includes Dickie Owen, the titular fiend from THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, as the living Prem - and viewers will also be disappointed by the lack of cleavage, especially as so much is on offer from Kimberly's promotional poses. Unusually for Hammer, the glamour girl role is a character with a narrative function (the somnambulist Claire has the ability to read the "words of death"), but unfortunately Kimberly - who had just appeared in Gilling's secret agent spoof WHERE THE BULLETS FLY - is the worst actress in the Classic Hammer canon.

Studio Canal's Blu-ray/DVD was released in October 2012, containing two standout documentaries: an informative making-of and a touching tribute by Madeline Smith for husband David Buck.

As Jonathan Rigby points out in English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema, a telling sign of the relegated stature of Hammer's Mummy sequels is that stunt men were cast as the monster, following Christopher Lee's barnstorming performance in Fisher's original. The real monster of THE MUMMY'S SHROUD is Preston, expertly portrayed by Phillips as an arrogant coward: quick to enjoy the spoils, even quicker to escape when the curse starts to take hold. Elizabeth Sellars, as his wife Barbara, makes an excellent foil, and it is good to see Michael Ripper in a prolonged role as Preston's long-suffering valet, the myopic Longbarrow. Completing the cast are Catherine Lacey and Roger Delgado's scene-stealing turns as the mother-and-son team whose family have barred the entrance to Kah-to-Bey's tomb for centuries. In fact Lacey's role as fortune-teller Haiti, together with Barbara and Claire, form a trio of female characters with second sight, while the male protagonists are lambs to the slaughter. 

The Mummy itself has always been the slightest of movie monsters. Covered in bandages that barely conceal the decay beneath, and often reduced to stalk-and-slash with a mystical backdrop, the Mummy started life on film as a device for camera trickery; in both Melies' 1899 CLEOPATRA and Walter Booth's 1901 HAUNTED CURIOSITY SHOP, the creature was an object to illustrate the joys of celluloid illusion. Unlike the heralded literary origins of Dracula and Frankenstein, the springboard for the Mummy as a potential movie monster was enhanced by real life: the myths surrounding Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon's 1924 expedition to uncover the tomb of Tutankhamen. In Hammer's fourth and final excursion into this sub-genre - 1971's BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB - the studio side-stepped including the bandaged menace altogether. Yet unlike Universal's arthritic Mummy movies, at least Hammer's ancient terrors were brutal threats.

Beast of Burden

AGAINST THE CROWD - MURRAIN (1975)
BEASTS (1976)

The thing in the wall: Jo (Jane Wymark) increasingly feels that she and her unborn child are in danger, in the BEASTS episode BABY.

MADE for the ATV anthology series AGAINST THE CROWD - a set of self-contained dramas focusing on outsiders - the Nigel Kneale-penned MURRAIN acted as an impromptu pilot for BEASTS, produced for the same ITV studio a year later. MURRAIN is the story of young vet Alan Crich (David Simeon), who discovers that a stretch of farmland may be hexed by Mrs Clemson (Una Brandon-Jones). Crich attempts to mediate between the alleged witch and the disgruntled local farmers, led by Mr Mably (Bernard Lee). Featuring Kneale's preoccupation of the clash between the supernatural and the rational, the play is also influenced by the writer's own superstitious locale growing up on the Isle of Man. There are no real scares in the programme, rather it is a character-and-mood piece where the viewer is left to draw their own conclusions.

Kneale's six stories for BEASTS would detail another of his favourite themes, that of the primal instincts that exist within civilised man, and the effects when repressed feelings are set free. BABY sees the mummified remains of a strange creature found in a country cottage; BUDDYBOY features a haunted dolphinarium; THE DUMMY has an actor taken over by his monster suit; SPECIAL OFFER tells of a gremlin loose in a mini-supermarket; WHAT BIG EYES shows an amateur scientist carrying out experiments to turn himself into a wolf; and rats are on the rampage in DURING BARTY'S PARTY.

Set in North Cornwall, the farmers of the AGAINST THE CROWD play MURRAIN believe a witch is responsible for the plight of their pig stock and the illness of a local boy.

Kneale was always an "ideas" man, but BEASTS shows a developing flair for character and dialogue. Thankfully then that the series features a number of stoic performances from fresh faces and seasoned veterans - including Simon MacCorkindale, T.P. McKenna, Martin Shaw, Clive Swift, Thorley Walters, Pauline Quirke and Elizabeth Sellars. Particularly effective are the verbal battles between Michael Kitchen's RSPCA officer and Patrick Magee's eccentric pet-shop owner in WHAT BIG EYES. For a such a character-driven series, the misses are uniform to a handful of weaker performances. Quirke is fine in SPECIAL OFFER, but her co-workers seem staid in what is in itself the silliest and most repetitive episode. BUDDYBOY is the oddest of the tales, and the fusion of Shaw as a porn theatre owner taking over a disused dolphin pool never quite gels in story or execution. The actor is suitably bullish, put the performance of Pamela Moiseiwitsch as a girl who has an umbilical connection with the ghost of the star dolphin is overtly glacial.

As BEASTS is made up of six totally unrelated entries, the quality ultimately dips, despite Kneale's impressive scope of imagination. The doom-laden BABY is almost a companion piece to MURRAIN, as it features another vet at odds with a superstitious rural community. It is widely considered to be the best - and certainly the most chilling - of the series, and as Andy Murray points out in his programme notes to the Network BEASTS DVD, BABY also has connections to QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, with builders unearthing "a sinister, ancient capsule which turns out to contain ... something." THE DUMMY is also a highlight, and a real joy for Hammer fans, as Kneale draws on his underwhelming experiences working for the production house. There is little doubt that with the casting of Walters and the feature being made by a fictional British company - REVENGE OF THE DUMMY - are thinly veiled snipes at his time with the famous studio.