2022 A month of Halloween movies -- October 26th
"Transylvania 6-5000" (1963) [HBO Max]
No, not the 1985 Jeff Goldblum film with the same gag title. The 1963 Merrie Melodies short that was apparently Chuck Jones' last effort for Warner Bros. before he went to do a stint at MGM. It popped up as an option, I figured, what the hell, it's been a while since I watched this one.
It's not one of the best. It's really not one of the middling. There are glimmers of Jones' signature style--how couldn't there be?--but it feels a little rough and phoned in, and most of the jokes feel a little bloodless, as if Count Bloodcount got to them before the opening credits. (It says something about the laziness of this one that Count Bloodcount is indecisively somewhere between a Lugosi impression and a Karloff impression, though one of his lines about rest being good for the blood is just distinctive enough to have made its way as a sample into an early Gorillaz tune.)
You do get one of the best wizard battles of all time, somehow and ironically; the irony being that the setup for said wizard battle is a kind of lazy "whenever someone says a magic word, a thing happens, but the thing that happens doesn't even manage to follow the surreal logic of a really good Looney Tunes cartoon. Still, forgiving the lack of even internal cartoon logic, there is something wacky enough about Bugs judiciously getting Count Bloodcount to bludgeon himself wobbly with a huge flooring stone by turning him into a bat every time the Count turns himself into a biped to accordionize Bugs with the heavy piece of stone. So it's got that going for it, anyway.
The Mummy (1959) [HBO Max]
I get the historical context just fine: there was a revived Egyptology craze after the 1922 rediscovery of Tutankhamun's Tomb; it was actually a second pop culture craze for all things Ancient Egyptian, the first going back to the first wave of European Egyptian tomb robbing by the French in the 19th Century. When the Brits claimed Egypt as a protectorate after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (a consequence of World War I), they started doing a fair amount of tomb raiding and a fair amount of Ancient Egyptian-themed stories began appearing in the pulps again. Which led to Universal making a mummy monster movie in 1932, which led to a string of sequels as part of what we'd now call a franchise, which eventually led to Britain's Hammer Film Productions doing their own ripoff to go along with their takes on Dracula, the Wolfman, Frankenstein's Monster, The Phantom of the Opera, etc.
So I understand why these movies kept getting made. And I understand why they keep getting made, with ongoing reboots and rips (the most recent, I believe, being the Tom Cruise flop that killed Universal's ill-conceived "Dark Universe" or whatever they wanted to call their response to every other studio having their family of interconnected films; bit of irony, if you think about it, that the studio that invented shared universe franchises in the '30s can't come up with one of their own in the 21st Century, but you might also think of it as a mercy; but I digress).
I just don't really think there's anything terribly scary about somebody brooding about in faux ancient Eastern robes (the 1932 Universal version) or staggering around wrapped in filthy bandages (the 1959 offering) or even turning into bugs or sand or whatever (I'm not a fan of the 1999/2000s franchise starring Brendan Fraser--the second one was so bad it's one of the few films I've started without finishing (I might have even made it through if the fans I was with hadn't hated it more than I did and insisted on turning it off; I'm a bit of a masochist in that way); but I will give that series credit insofar as reinventing the series as an off-brand Indiana Jones lark isn't the worst take you could have on the premise). Maybe it's seeing too many mummies unraveled in Scooby Doo and other cartoons, or maybe it's kids Halloween costumes made out of toilet paper, or maybe it's playing D&D as a kid and knowing the obvious secret was to hit one with a torch and watch it go up like a Guy Fawkes dummy. Or maybe it's just that mummies really aren't that scary. They just aren't.
Nor are they terribly romantic in my view. That's the other piece these movies always seem to go for: the titular mummy, whether wrapped or unwrapped, is obsessed with some dead girl he knew thousands of years ago. I've carried enough torches to understand how sad that really is. She's over you and her internal organs are in jars in the corner, man, move on already. I'm not really kidding here. It's the same pseudoromantic trope that helped ruin Wonder Woman '84 and a seemingly infinite number of movies: I believe a love can last forever, I'm just not at all convinced it can last alone or solitary, and these stories where someone loves one other person forever (that's fine) and never falls in love again nor moves on (this is not fine) are more sad than sweet.
And this, all of this has barely touched on the Orientalism (which is always a bit odd to me, since Egypt may be considered the Middle East but is nevertheless in North Africa) and all the ooky Colonialist bullshit that's explicitly tied up into these movies. Egypt is, in these movies, exotic and backwards, death-obsessed and colorfully strange, and the West digging up Egypt's dead royals and propping them up in museums to be gawked at is just a thing and hardly worth threatening archaeologists over. Not that this is the reason the archaeologists are being threatened, not really: there may be a bit of talk about cursing the people who desecrated the tomb of Someone Unpronounceable With Many Ks In His Name, but when you really get down to it the real menace is dark-skinned people (or, more accurately, White people in brownface) coming to steal the White women (who they will bury alive to have sex with, because that's just how these foreigners roll, didn't you know?).
So I've said a lot about the concept of Mummy Movies but not a lot about this one. It's a lesser Hammer offering, the great Peter Cushing and great Christopher Lee trying to kill each other again notwithstanding. It lacks the malice of Hammer's Frankenstein movies and the Goth Badassery of their Draculas, The high point in Jimmy Sangster's screenplay is arguably when the movie's real villain, Mehmet Bey (the Cypriot actor George Pastell, who spent much of his career playing "exotic" (i.e. not a White Guy) characters in British spy movies and TV shows) harangues the movie's hero (played by Cushing, of course) about Britain stealing Egyptian corpses and turning them into museum displays. Cushing's character, almost needless to say, pretty much blows off the point and says something about preserving history in a way that implies it's not really History history unless somebody from Western Europe (and, okay, maybe the United States) dug it up and stole it. I have no idea how audiences took the exchange in 1959, supposing they even paid much attention to it, but watching the movie today it seems like Bey has the better case to make and you might even hope a little that he'd win if his entire crusade wasn't otherwise being presented as an unbalanced and kooky quixotic revenge mission on behalf of a decadent cult of which he appears to be the solitary remaining member.
Yes, I'm glad I watched it. The Hammer Mummy was possibly the only Hammer Monster whose movies I'd seen none of, and now I think I can say I've seen at least one movie with each of them.
But I still don't think mummies are scary.
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