Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy
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- Release Date: June 23, 1955
- Directed by: Charles Lamont
- Written by: John Grant and Lee Loeb
- Runtime: 1 hour 19 minutes
- Series: Universal Classic Monsters
Like everything in entertainment, trends and styles come and go. By the middle of the 1950s, Abbott and Costello were over the peak of their popularity, and the projects they were in were beginning to do worse with audiences. In 1955, the duo had one final encounter with a Universal Monster in Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. While I would love to sit here and write about how this movie is just as good as Meet Frankenstein or Meet the Invisible Man, I can't lie to you. This movie is just straight-up bad.
Abbott and Costello play two guys who are trying to get a job guarding a mummy as it is taken to America. However, the mummy is stolen by some of its followers, who bring it to life to stop treasure hunters from raiding its tomb. I'm honestly struggling to write much about the plot of this one, because I have one major issue with this movie: the premise is dry, stale, and boring. The Mummy films that Universal made in the 1940s typically followed treasure hunters who wanted to raid a tomb of some sort, and a mummy is reanimated to pick them off one by one. Here, the same premise is used, but with two bumbling protagonists thrown in. None of the timing or charm from the previous Abbott and Costello Meet movies is here at all. You can tell that both actors are tired and phoning it in at this point. Most of this movie relies on physical humor, and none of it lands for me at all. I don't think I've laughed once while watching this thing in the past.
As for the mummy himself, forget about it. He doesn't even wake up until almost an hour into the movie, and by that point, I was so bored by the rest of it that I really didn't care. He doesn't get that much time to shine either, as Abbott and another character both dress up as mummies at one point. You would think that one mummy and two imposters running around would make for some good material, but again, it's just slow and stale. Not much is done different here, and even though it was done well twice before, nothing seems to work for me. Most of the routine is the mummy miming things, or chasing Abbott and Costello with his arms out. Yawn.
This was one of the final movies released in the classic era of the Universal Monsters, and not too much later, the series came to an end. Four years later, Hammer Films would bring fresh life to the character in their 1959 remake of The Mummy. If you're watching Mummy movies, skip right over this one and get to the Hammer one. You're not missing a thing.