Abbott and Costello
Meet the Mummy
Director: Charles
Lamont
Year: 1955
Rating: 6.0
Today I went to
see my analyst and asked him why I am still watching these Abbott and Costello
films even though I don't really like them. He told me I was trying to recapture
my youth. Not my youth I told him. It sucked. Pimples and anxiety. So, I went
to the neighborhood witch doctor and asked him the same question. He said
because you are an idiot and laugh at stupid things that you shouldn't at
your age. That sounded about right. Abbott and Costello movies bring humor
down to idiot levels but within all of us lies an idiot waiting to laugh at
people falling down, being smacked, running in circles in terror and screaming.
By 1955 I guess even Universal had enough because this was to be the last
one they produced. They made 28 films for Universal over 15-years. A&C
made only one more film but not at Universal - though they distributed it.
You can see the hieroglyphics on the wall. Everything looks cheap about this
film - the sets and even the Mummy wrappings. It is a bit of an insult to
Mummies all over the world. Their monster films had given A&C a new lease
on life but basically they are the same film, the same routines but with a
different monster. Universal had the rights to these great monsters that they
created and so why not and in truth I love seeing them all again. The
Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, the Wolfman. These are the
foundation of horror.
This film is so lazy that though the two
of them had script names, neither actor could bother to remember them and
just call each other by their real names. They are penniless and stuck in
Cairo at a night club where a marvelous A-pa-che dance is being performed
with one guy and three women being tossed around like confetti. Abbott overhears
a professor saying he needs two men to get his Mummy home to America. Costello
thinks he means his mama. The Mummy is Klaris (played by Eddie Parker who
had doubled for Lon Chaney Jr in earlier Mummy films) and his cult has kept
him alive in his coffin. The Cult leader is played by Richard Deacon who must
have been available because Deacon who was Mel on the Dick Van Dyke Show
looks like an accountant.
The Professor is dead but the Sacred Medallion
which has instructions on how to get to Princess Ara's treasure is missing.
Two groups are after it - the Cult and a group of three run by Marie Windsor
with Dan Seymour and Michael Ansara. The boys are in the middle and do a lot
of running and sliding. Costello ends up with the medallion in his stomach
after eating it on a hamburger. Multiple Mummies are around. One real, two
fake. A couple of their routines are ok - pick and shovel and once they are
told that the Medallion brings death passing it on to one another. Windsor
gives the film some class and sex appeal and she looks great holding a gun.
Some laughs along the way. The two of them were of an era. The comedy teams
in films. That was coming to an end. Lewis and Martin, Hope and Crosby, Laurel
and Hardy, Wheeler & Woolsey and Abbott and Costello.
