There is almost no rational reason for my love of old Mummy movies. They are the slowest of the classic monsters; they only seem to have one (rather hard to trigger) goal in life; without a convenient Egyptian helper to make hot tea they can’t function at all; and they are inevitably tripped up by some damned woman getting reincarnated at just the wrong time and in just the wrong place. Rarely has the term ‘cursed monster’ been more accurate than when applied to these sad moldering crypt dodgers but I still get a thrill from their often inept murderous fumbling and stumbling.
I’m strange.
I actually have quite the strong affinity for mummy movies myself, and, frankly, I've never really been able to adequately explain the fascination to myself. In truth, I, for years, avoided mummies like the plague for many of the exact reasons you cite. Essentially, mummies are romanticized zombies. Of course, zombies are rarely menacing when there's just one of 'em, and, fact is, mummies almost never travel in packs. Plus, there's the fact that so many mummy movie plots are carbon copies of one another. Let's face it, the mummy is a hard creature to come up with a truly unique plot for. But in the last year or so I've come around and developed quite an affection for the bandage-faced baddies. My favorite mummy movies are Naschy's own Vengeance Of The Mummy and Hammer's Blood From The Mummy's Tomb (Valerie Leon's has a great big pair of "acting talents").
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