With my beloved Cincinnati Reds actually in the MLB playoffs this year, I haven't had much free time so far for this year's DVD Talk Horror Challenge so I decided while struggling with insomnia tonight to dabble with some of the old Universal Monsters. I've seen all of the Dracula, Frankenstein and Wolf Man pictures, so it was time for something new (so to speak): The Mummy.

I accepted going into the film that it was going to present fake-Egyptology, and that's fine with me. The sets and costumes weren't terribly authentic but they looked good and that's all that I needed from them in a picture like this. Karloff's makeup was superb, and I found myself marveling at how impressive that was every time the camera closed in on him.

I found myself, of course, conjuring memories of his iconic performances as Frankenstein's Monster. He's mute in Frankenstein and only growls a handful of stilted words in Bride of Frankenstein. I found it fascinating (even a bit startling) to hear him speak more normally here, forgetting that I've seen him in other speaking roles. It wasn't until more than halfway through the film that I caught an inflection that reminded me of his narration of the animated TV special, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

Unfortunately, though, I wasn't really wowed by the film. Part of it, of course, is that the resurrected-long-lost-love story involving a modern woman embodying the displaced soul of someone else just doesn't feel very well developed here. I can't even give it a pass on the basis that so many of the other films I've seen with that premise were made after it. After all, Universal's own production of Dracula was made just one year earlier than The Mummy and it handled a variation on the theme much more solidly.

That's really the biggest problem with The Mummy: Dracula told a comparable story, and it told it better. This point is underscored by the presence of character actor Edward Van Sloan. He thwarted Dracula as Van Helsing, and appears here as Dr. Muller, an expert on Egyptian occultist mythology. It feels as though Van Sloan's very presence is a shorthand, used to get us to just accept that Muller knows things about Imhotep's scheme. (Seriously, how does he find Frank on the floor and discern from this that Imhotep is going to kill and resurrect Helen?)

That wasn't even the most egregious sloppiness of the film. That has to be everything about Frank. Here's a guy who's an experienced archaeologist who followed in his father's footsteps all the way back to Cairo, but then needs to be spoon fed everything there is to know about Egypt? I can accept to a point that his intense attraction to Helen was part of the spell or whatever controlling her, but he scarcely registers that his father has been murdered because he's too busy professing his love to her? I just didn't buy anything about the guy.

It's funny, in a way, because we're so used to discussing one-dimensional "damsels in distress" characters, but here's a prime example of a rarely discussed male counterpart. How many times have we seen a protagonist so innocent he's naive, whose sole purpose is to represent the redemption of said damsel? Frank brings absolutely nothing to this story, or to Helen, except to be her consolation prize at the end of the film.

The Mummy entered my Flickchart at #1289/1433