Working as a direct sequel to The Mummy’s Hand, The Mummy’s Tomb is supposed to take place some thirty years after the previous film as Karis the Mummy (now played by Lon Chaney JR.) is used to hunt down the members of the party that defiled the tomb in the previous film.

That means archeologist Stephen Banning (Dick Foran) and his buddy Babe Hanson (Wallace Ford) are both on the chopping block, and when Karis’ minder/master, Mehemet Bey (Turhan Bey) falls for the lovely Isobel (Elyse Knox) he adapts plans to satisfy his own lust.

The film has an incredibly short runtime, only sixty minutes, and the first ten minutes of that are Banning recapping the plot of the previous film. Bey assumes the mantle of head priest and transports Kharis to America to hunt down the Banning party, and despite their escape in the first film, it looks like they won’t make it out of this one alive.

Still, moving the story to America doesn’t change a lot of the beats of the story, because in the end, Isobel needs to be saved, and it’ll be up to her fella, John Banning (John Hubbard), law enforcement and the townspeople tracking down Bey, the Mummy, and their captive.

Chaney is great, making the Mummy his own, while making sure the performance is inline with what has been onscreen previous to this.

It’s fun, if over a little quickly, and I never understand why horror sequels felt the need to jump further along the timeline, like thirty years later in this case, but everything looks the same, the clothes, the cars. It never seems to work. There has to be a better way around it, plot-wise, but I guess the writers weren’t too concerned about it.

I do like the Universal Monster movies, and honestly, this one could have worked a lot better. I get that these were kind of churned out for the matinee crowd, and genre at the time (and even still a little now) were frowned upon, despite the fact that they could make money. But a little more intelligence in crafting the plot could have served the story a little better.

I like the fact that the heroes from the previous film don’t survive long into this one, but Babe Hansom’s character provided so much comic relief in the previous film. This one needed a little more of that. and maybe a little more from the Mummy as well.

I mean you have Chaney, use him! He looks great as the Mummy lets make him really scary, and give him more to do than shuffling along.

The Universal Monster exploration continues next time as I dive into Invisible Agent.