I just watched Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb for the first time in maybe ten years. A great film, one of my favourites from Hammer, even if it does expect us to believe that a suburban semi has a basement large enough for full scale replicas of Egyptian tombs and an incinerator capable of disposing of a human body with plenty of legroom to spare. But what the hell, that’s not really the most far-fetched thing in the film. I’d only ever seen it on murky VHS, taped from a late night Channel 4 broadcast from around 1990, so it was nice to see it on a decent DVD transfer.

Through the extras I was reminded that Peter Cushing had originally been cast as Fuchs, but had to pull out after only one day of filming due to his wife becoming gravely ill. Andrew Keir replaced him.

So I thought I’d fire up google and see if I could find any further info. Autocomplete’s top result turned out to be much more frightening than the film itself.

More people are bleeding from their anuses than are searching for information on this fine film. What hope for the world? Anyway, here’s a nice picture of Peter Cushing and Valerie Leon taken on the first day of filming, and a trailer.

The scene was so unreal I could barely believe it: two tired, frightened young men sitting in a hole beside a machine gun in the rain on a ridge, surrounded with mud – nothing but stinking mud, with so much decaying human flesh buried or half buried in it that there were big patches of wriggling fat maggots marking the spots where Japanese corpses lay – looking at the picture of a beautiful seminude girl. She was a pearl in a mudhole.

Viewing that picture made me realize with a shock that I had gradually come to doubt that there really was a place in the world where there were no explosions and people weren’t bleeding, suffering, dying, or rotting in the mud.

E.B. Sledge – With The Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa.

~

We fully expect some of the comet particles to be older than the sun.
Donald Brownlee