Overlooked Movies: Blood from the Mummy's Tomb

Blood from the Mummy's Tomb is one of the later Hammer horror films, and not one of the best, but when it showed up on TCM, I recorded it and took a look.  It's based on Bram Stoker's Jewel of the Seven Stars, and it's not a real mummy movie.  That is, there's no wrapped up menace.  Instead we get Valerie Leon, who's Tera, the sorcerous woman placed in a tomb in some sort of suspended animation by Egyptian priests, who then cut off her hand and throw it to wild dogs.  Not that it does them much good, as they all wind up with their throats torn out.  There are a good many torn-out throats in the movie.

Many years after the entombment, Prof Fuchs (Andrew Keir) leads an expedition that discovers Tera. While he's in the tomb, his wife back in England dies in childbirth, and the child dies, too.  But she revives when Fuchs speaks the name Tera.  She grows up to look just like Tera, and she's also played by Valerie Leon. She has a red scar on her wrist. And Fuchs just happens to have smuggled Tera's body and sarcophagus into his basement.  Don't ask how.  On his daughter's birthday, he gives her a ruby ring taken from Tera's severed hand.  You can probably guess the rest, as the new Tera is gradually taken over by the old one, who uses the new one to get revenge on the members of the expedition and to take and artifact from each one.  The artifacts will allow her full return to live when all are gathered.  

There's an evil member of the expedition who's trying to facilitate Tera's return, and there's the new Tera's boyfriend who's trying to help her fight the takeover.  Lots of people die, and the ending of the movie is either satisfactory or not, depending on how you like ambiguity.

Blood from the Mummy's Tomb isn't great, and it's pretty slow, but it's passable Halloween entertainment.