Karl Freund
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Filmography
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The Mummy (1999)
Directed by Stephen Sommers
influenced by The Mummy (1932), Mad Love (1935)
Plot Characters
More akin to that film than its ghoulish predecessors of the same name -- most notably 1932's "The Mummy" with Boris Karloff as the title character or Hammer's 1959 remake starring Christopher Lee as the old guy in wraps -- this remake's many striking similarities to "Raiders" seriously undermine its efforts before it ever gets a chance to get going.
"The Mummy" of the title is not a silent, shambling mass of bandages but, in a nod to the 1932 Boris Karloff masterpiece of the same name, a human figure obsessed with bringing his lover of 3000 years ago back from the grave.
Despite having the same title as the 1932 Boris Karloff flick, The Mummy is only a remake in the broadest sense of the word.
1932's The Mummy cast Karloff as Im-ho-tep (alias Ardath Bay), an ancient Egyptian prince brought back to life.
This year, that film is "The Mummy" a loose-as-a-goose remake of the 1932 Universal horror classic.
Later he was to script Freund's other memorable directorial work, the delirious Mad Love (1935), and for James Whale he would script arguably the best of the Universal Horrors, James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
That film, The Mummy , took Boris Karloff’s pre-code horror stylings and applied a level of Amblin sheen to the whole ordeal, owing less to Karl Freund’s gothic stylings than it did the reflexive (but still compelling) trappings of the Indiana Jones franchise.
Universal’s project to resuscitate its “classic monsters” for contemporary audiences got off on the wrong foot with Alex Kurtzman’s awful 2017 version of “The Mummy,” but recovers with Leigh Whannell’s cunning, timely reimagining of the premise of H.G. Wells’s novel, which was memorably brought to the screen by James Whale in 1933.
Cinephiles will recognize dreamy allusions, most obviously to Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, but there are also deep-red hints of early Dario Argento films, Robert Wiene's The Hands of Orlac and its remake, Karl Freund's Mad Love, and the films of David Cronenberg, among others.
When done right, you get movies from Hereditary to The Mummy.