My hopes were not high for this barely one hour film after it spent a full 12 minutes recapping the events of "The Mummy's Hand" in excruciating detail with liberal use of clips from that film. However, it picks up rapidly after 20 minutes or so and becomes a very entertaining Universal Monsters film. Lon Chaney, Jr. is quite intimidating as the Mummy but not to the same extent as he was as the Wolf Man and Frankenstein's Monster. Dick Foran and Wallace Ford are much better as Stephen Banning and Babe Hanson (formerly Jenson) respectively than in the previous film even though they both have far less screen time. However, John Hubbard and Elyse Knox don't make much impression as the leads. (Incidentally, Knox was the mother of "NCIS" star Mark Harmon and you can certainly see the family resemblance.) The strongest performers are George Zucco in his brief cameo as Andoheb - he actually appears more in the clips from the previous film than in this one - and the 20-year-old, baby faced Turhan Bey as Mehemet Bey.

After a brief retelling of the previous movie ("The Mummy's Hand") it is now 30 years later and "Stephen Banning" (Dick Foran) is telling some relatives of his adventures in Egypt. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, we find that both the mummy, "Kharis" (Lon Chaney Jr.) and the High Priest of Karnak, "Andoheb" (George Zucco) managed to survive. However, Andoheb is old and frail and he chooses a new person named "Mehemet Bey" (Turhan Bey) to succeed him upon his death. When that happens Turhan Bey decides to exact vengeance upon those who dared to commit sacrilege to the ancient Egyptian gods. This vengeance also extends to any family members as well. Anyway, rather than revealing what happens next I will just say that this was an okay sequel to the previous film. Unfortunately, the short length of the film (only an hour) prevented it from achieving anything noteworthy or remarkable. As such I rate it as average.

This entry in Universal's classic Mummy series is often dismissed for having too much stock footage from the previous entry, The Mummy's Hand, of which this is a sequel of, but I think The Mummy's Tomb improves on The Mummy's Hand in more than one counts. 1) The cinematography, esp. the lighting is much more sophisticated here. 2) The priest's infatuation with the white woman is better developed. In the previous entry, it was too sudden. Here, it is anticipated. 3) The iconic scenes of mummy-carrying-away-the-damsel-in-distress are longer. Setting the plot in an American town with a history of witch-hunts was also a nice touch. The movie would be even better if they had made more use of the cemetery setting. The downside for me is the ludicrous resort to torch(!)-carrying, rather than say flash-light carrying, masses in the finale.

Nothing will ruin a movie as much as the combination of a poor script and poor direction. This is the case with "The Mummy's Tomb."The script is leftover ideas from older, better Universal horror flicks like "Dracula" and "Frankenstein." The direction is trite and stale. The acting is mediocre. Even Chaney's Kharis is feeble compared to Tom Tyler's in "The Mummy's Hand," and the producers are foolish enough to add footage from Christy Cabanne's vastly better prequel and point up the weakness of their own film!Universal realized how bad this movie was, and essentially remade it from scratch two years later as "The Mummy's Ghost" with a much better script and better director. The result was likely the best film in their four film "Mummy" cycle, although not anywhere near as good as Karl Freund's 1932 original.Cabanne's footage raises this film to a 3. The "new" stuff is a 2 at best. Dick Foran and Wallace Ford were probably glad to see their characters bumped off so they wouldn't have to appear in dreck like this anymore!