Pharaoh's Curse (1957)

Studio: MGM
Theatrical Release: Feb. 1957
DVD-R Release: April 2nd, 2012
Rating:
Directed by Lee Sholem
Review by Craig Sorensen





Hey, remember a few weeks ago when I was complaining about a movie called Tale of the Mummy?  A mummy movie that refuses to give you a goddamn mummy?  That movie really pissed me off.  And yet, here we are again, reviewing a mummy movie without a goddamn mummy only this time I love it.  What’s the difference?  Why is it OK for the writer (Richard H. Landau who wrote Frankenstein 1970 & Voodoo Island) and director (Lee Sholem, director of Tobor the Great & Superman and the Mole Men) of this to pull some revisionist shit but Russell Mulcahy gets the stink eye?  In the case of Tale of the Mummy, everything feels like it’s in the service of making the filmmakers look ‘cool’.  With Pharaoh’s Curse, the filmmakers seem more interested in making things entertaining.  Imagine that, entertainment from a motion picture!

Pharaoh’s Curse is perfect late night viewing.  It has just the right amount of comfortable familiarity and strangeness.  You’ve got a fairly standard cast in Mark Dana and Diane Brewster as Captain Storm and Sylvia Quentin respectively.  Dana is pretty wooden as leading men are concerned but that seems to be kind of the standard for ‘50s monster movies.  Diane Brewster is good but doesn’t have much to do other than play the damsel in distress.  They set out from Cairo in search of Sylvia’s husband and his team of archaeologists.  Along the way they pick up a strange Egyptian woman named Simira (Ziva Rodann of Macumba Love).  They manage to find Robert Quentin (George Neise of The Three Stooges in Orbit) just after he opens a long sealed sarcophagus.  As they begin to cut the bandages off the mummy inside, their egyptian guide faints, with a strange, fresh cut where they just cut the mummy.  From here things take off pretty quickly (this thing is only sixty six minutes so there isn’t a whole lot of time for fucking around).

The two things that I really like about this are some of the supporting players and the monster itself.  George Neise plays his part with a slightly mad drive.  He’s willing to put his discovery of the Pharaoh above the well being of everyone in the camp, even after people start turning up dead.  Robert Fortin has some good scenes at the drunken Claude Beauchamp and Kurt Katch plays a good red herring as the German Hans Brecht.  But in a film like this, it really comes down to the monster.  And they really went all out making a strange one.  I don’t know how much I want to give away honestly.  I will say that this isn’t a mummy film.  You also get a good old-timey organ soundtrack by Lex Baxter.

Now on to the bad news.  MGM’s new DVD-R of Pharaoh’s Curse looks like crap.  I mean, it’s watchable I guess, it just has some major problems.  First of all, this is 1.33:1 and looks like it needs to be cropped to something like 1.78:1.  There is way too much headroom here and if you zoom in it should look OK.  But if you zoom in you’re just going to make this transfer look worse.  Everything is soft here.  There is video noise all over the place.  It’s not that big of a deal in the daylight scenes but at night it’s really distracting.  And most of this film takes place at night (or rather day-for-night).  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this is just an old video master for television.  Still, if you’re looking for obscure ‘50s horror, don’t let the issues with the transfer scare you away.  The only audio option is a Dolby Digital mono track.  It sounds good.  There are no subtitles so good luck if you don’t speak English.  There also are no special features here unfortunately.