Dawn of the Mummy (Frank Agrama, 1981)

Dawn of the Mummy has one of the greatest premises. A group of New York fashion models accidentally revives an ancient Egyptian mummy and the mummy's horde of zombielike undead servants during a photo shoot in a newly disturbed tomb near Cairo, which has been dynamited open by a trio of tomb raiders shortly before the models arrived. Does the movie live up to this insane premise? Sadly, no, but good times are to be had anyway despite the sometimes sluggish pace.

The film begins with a mostly unnecessary prologue set in the fourth millennium BC. A pharaoh named Sefirama has died, and slave raiders kidnap some villagers to be burial servants for the pharaoh. Talk about a shit day. You're just chilling in the sand, and some assholes ride up on horses, kidnap you, and force you to be buried with a dead guy as his eternal servant. (Though this is kind of what the state legislature I work for has been doing to me this year.) The priestess during the burial ceremony says that anyone who disturbs the tomb will get an ass-kicking, mummy-style. I'm paraphrasing her remarks.

What follows is one of the most unlikely scene juxtapositions in cinema history. After the burial of a pharaoh in 300 and something BC, some modern day tomb dynamiting, and the deaths of some interlopers from poison gas (one of the characters assures us that the poison gas science is sound), we're slapped into 1981 New York City, where a model in short-shorts and roller skates strikes Mentos-commercial-style poses for a photographer next to the Hudson River. Next, we see a montage of various attractive supermodels rushing through the crowded Manhattan streets and stock footage of an airplane in flight with a voiceover delivering some hilariously unnatural exposition (something like, "make sure you get these top models to Egypt, Bill, and do some great photographs for Fashion Magazine or we'll lose the account!")

We're back in Egypt. Our tomb raiders, two locals named Karib and Tarak (Ibrahim Khan and Ali Gohar) and an American named Rick (George Peck), wait for the poison gas to disperse and then enter Sefirama's tomb to loot some gold. Peck as Rick does the most acting you've ever seen. Maybe not the best acting, but definitely the most acting. You've never seen a guy make more facial expressions, body movements, and enthusiastic line readings than this Peck fella. He doesn't just chew the scenery; he smacks it, flips it, and rubs it down.

Near the tomb, two jeeps packed with supermodels Lisa (Brenda King, who later married Roy Scheider), Melinda (Ellen Faison), June (Diane Beatty), and Gary (John Salvo), makeup artist Jenny (Joan Levy), and photographer Bill (Barry Sattels) stop for a bit to change a flat tire in one of the jeeps. Lisa and Gary wander around to explore the sand dunes, and Lisa stumbles upon a severed head. She freaks out, but everyone seems to forget about the head after a few minutes. It's a sand dune. You're going to stumble across a decapitated head occasionally. Shake it off.

The fashion gang soon land themselves in more trouble when they find the newly opened tomb. Karib, thinking they're a different crew of tomb raiders, starts shooting at them, prompting Gary or Bill, not sure which, to deliver a hilarious line reading: "What the hell is happeniiing?" Rick wrestles the gun from Karib and yells at him, telling him the people he's shooting at are probably just tourists. He tries to smooth things over with the models, telling them they're trespassing on an excavation site, but they brush right past him and his warnings and enter the tomb. Bill immediately starts making photo shoot plans, and he sets up his cameras and lights and starts clicking away, the models posing next to the mummy. They recover quickly, this group. Severed heads. Gunfire. Nothing stops them from creating a photo shoot for a big-time fashion mag.

Rick decides to humor the supermodels and photographer since he figures they're not after the gold. He lets them shoot in the tomb for a few days. Unfortunately, it's scientific fact that tomb plundering combined with hot photographer's lights combined with supermodel pose-downs leads to mummy reanimation. The mummy comes back to life, and his undead servants crawl out from underneath the dunes, which is a little odd considering they were buried in the tomb with the pharaoh, but I'll allow it.

The mummy and his ghouls start picking people off, one by one, culminating in a wild finale in the nearby village during a wedding. We've got jeep driving, hookah smoking, entrail eating, brain axing, zombie shuffling, midnight swimming, exuberant dancing, ruined weddings, pandemonium in the streets, dynamite blasts, at least two jerks getting their comeuppance, and some serious supermodel vs. mummy/zombie action. We also get one of the worst songs ever written, performed on acoustic guitar by Gary around a campfire, which is fortunately interrupted by mummy-zombies in the middle of the first chorus, saving us from learning more about "the rainbow in your eyes" or something along those lines.

Frank Agrama is not one of your premier cinematic visionaries, and the visual style of Dawn of the Mummy is fairly perfunctory, but location shooting and the crazy story really pep things up. It occasionally drags, but a crazy line reading, fashion photo shoot, mummy attack, or BIG acting choice from Peck is never far away, and the mummy looks pretty damn cool. This is not a particularly good movie, but it has a lot of weirdo low-budget charm, and that goes a long way with me. I had a pretty good time with this ridiculous thing.

The Human Monster aka The Dark Eyes of London (Walter Summers, 1939)

Here's a weird one. The Human Monster has an atypical, complicated story, a quietly relaxed pace, a wealth of strange details, strong performances, and a dry British sense of humor. It's a little too laidback to pack a real punch (except for a few moments in the final scenes), but I liked its party-of-one eccentricity.

A UK production with a couple of borrowed Hollywood actors, the film is set in London and begins with Scotland Yard detectives investigating a series of mysterious deaths. Single men with no families are turning up dead in the Thames. There are no visible signs of foul play, so suicide is the most likely explanation, but that doesn't sit well with head detective on the case, Larry Holt (Hugh Williams), who is being trailed on the job by a visiting detective from Chicago, Lt. Patrick O'Reilly (Edmon Ryan). There's a running gag throughout the film about how much Americans love guns versus their more sophisticated British counterparts in law enforcement and crime. The U.S. never really changes, does it?

The investigation leads to the office of a former doctor turned insurance agent named Feodor Orloff (Bela Lugosi). Some of the dead men in the Thames had life insurance policies with Orloff's office. Orloff has records of the beneficiaries of the policies and shows them to the detectives, but the dude is played by Bela Lugosi. You know he's up to some shit, especially when you see him hypnotize people with his eyes. The man has a lot going on.

Orloff, despite being a disgraced doctor who left the profession for the insurance biz under a cloud of scandal, is allowed to be a doctor on call for a home for the blind, run by a blind minister named John Dearborn who looks a lot like Lugosi in sunglasses and a wig (the Dearborn voice is dubbed by another actor named O.B. Clarence). I repeat, the man has a lot going on. Dearborn's and Orloff's assistant at the school, Jake (Wilfred Walter), is a hulkingly enormous blind man with pointy ears and a row of misshapen teeth who groans and grunts a lot.

It's no surprise that Orloff becomes the main suspect in the deaths, especially after the autopsy of the freshest Thames dead man, Henry Stuart (Gerald Pring), reveals the water in his lungs as tap water, not Thames water, and his life insurance policy was set up through Orloff's office. 

The audience by this point has already seen Stuart's fate and Orloff's extreme irritation when he finds out Stuart has a daughter living in New York who is about to return to London. The daughter, Diana (Greta Gynt), is enlisted in Scotland Yard's plan to take Orloff down upon her arrival, and she gets a job as a secretary at the home for the blind.

There's an unhurried pace to The Human Monster (except for the final third) that may annoy the nonstop action or nothing crowd, but I enjoy a good slow burn. I like movies that hang out instead of just slamming through plot points, and this movie still gets the job done in 76 minutes. Walter Summers is not enough of a distinctive filmmaker to lift this movie to the heights of '30s horror (a decade packed with classics), but he does a decent job with the material, especially when the craziness revs up in the finale.

Williams and Ryan are fine as the London/Chicago odd couple, who, of course, have a friendly rivalry but respect each other's methods, but Lugosi, Gynt, and Walter are the MVPs of the film. Lugosi gets to play around with a lot of different physical and personality traits, Gynt makes a great undercover agent and damsel in distress (she does an excellent horrified face), and Walter is both frightening and sympathetic, even while buried under makeup, wig, and prosthetics. I also really enjoyed Julie Suedo's small supporting performance as Orloff's secretary. She gives a great nothing-in-this-life-impresses-me look.

I don't have much spiel this time around. This is a solid little movie, and I give it a mild recommendation, especially if you're a Lugosi fan.