Now That's an Age Gap

Film: Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb
Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!

There’s a part of me that gets a little bit excited when I choose a horror movie to watch and it turns out to have been produced by Hammer. Not every Hammer film is good, of course, but a lot of them are and most of them are fun at the very least. Their vampire movies are probably their best, but I genuinely love it when they go wacky. Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb is very much in that wacky area. This is not really a mummy movie, but a movie where the mummies are more mummy in theme rather than shambling and wrapped in bandages.

An Egyptian expedition locates the tomb of Tara (Valerie Leon), an evil queen. How do we know she is evil? Well, in the opening sequences, Tara is forced to undergo a ritual by a bunch of priests who lop off her hand. This doesn’t stop her hand from being animated, though, and Tara’s powerful magic appears to kill all of the priests. The man leading the expedition, Julian Fuchs (Andrew Keir) has become obsessed with Tara, and has brought all of her artifacts back to England along with her body and has recreated her tomb in his house.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Nanny

Film: The Nanny
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on The New Portable.

Of all the genres and subgenres of film, the one that I find the most inexplicable is hagsploitation, or my preferred name for it, psycho-biddy. Seriously, who decided that crazy old ladies would make for the sort of film that people would really enjoy? I mean, I’m not upset that they did, because there are some great films in the genre, but there are also a few missteps, like The Nanny. Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t a terrible film, but it is an ultimately disappointing one. We’re given an ending that the film absolutely doesn’t earn, and it’s a damn shame.

What we have is a very wealthy family that has undergone some terrible hardships. Bill Fane (James Villiers) is cold and distant from his family, perhaps due to the tragedy that befell them. Wife Virginia (Wendy Craig) has been almost infantilized, while son Joey (William Dix) is just now returning home after being sent to a boarding school that specializes in problem children. Why is Joey a problem? Because his sister Susy (Angharad Aubrey in flashbacks) died in an accident that hasn’t been fully explained.