Directors: Seth Holt, Michael Carreras
Writers: Christopher Wicking
Stars: Andrew Keir, Valerie Leon, James Villiers
Run Time: 1 Hour, 34 Minutes
Link:
Synopsis
A woman dreams about mist-covered mountains. Inside the mountain is an Egyptian tomb. On the altar in the tomb, a bunch of men kills a girl and carry her hand outside to feed to the jackals. The men go back inside and seal the girl up in a sarcophagus while the hand kills the jackal and crawls away on its own. The men all leave the tomb, but walk into a windstorm that somehow cuts all their throats. The only thing left moving is the hand. The woman wakes up, screaming…
It’s Margaret’s birthday, and her father gives her a huge red ring and tells her she must wear it… always. The man who lives across the street watches her with binoculars and makes notes in a book. She goes to the museum to show the curator her ring, and as soon as he sees it, he collapses in some sort of fright attack.
We cut to the asylum. There’s an old man in the straight jacket who sees a glowing version of the big dipper (seven stars). The man from across the street goes to visit the man in the asylum.
A fortune-teller is reading her crystal ball, and she sees the seven stars. The book is based on Bram Stoker’s novel, “The Jewel of Seven Stars”, so that’s where that comes from, but the stars really don’t play any part in the movie beyond this point.
The curator calls the man with the binoculars, and tells him that Margaret Fox is “She who must not be named” and that in a few hours time, it will be her birthday. We flash back to “the expedition,” where scientists open up the mummy’s tomb; it’s where we saw them put the girl in the sarcophagus. Margaret’s father, whose name is Fuchs, the binocular man, the psychic lady, the asylum man, and the curator are all there. They open the tomb and see the dead girl, perfectly preserved, but with no hand. The arm bleeds where the hand was cut off thousands of years ago.
Margaret has a nightmare. She and her boyfriend Tod rush home to find Fuchs collapsed on the sarcophagus he has hidden in the basement. Margaret wanders around the room, seemingly recognizing the things here, even though she’s never seen them before. That night, she goes down there again in a trance and runs into the binocular man, whose name is Corbeck.
Corbeck explains that Fuchs had been obsessed with the “Queen of Darkness.” He explains that Margaret was born at the exact moment that Fuchs unearthed Tera, the girl in the sarcophagus. Her power is Astral, not physical. Corbeck thinks Margaret is carrying Tera’s soul.
They need to find all the original members of the archaeological party that found her, which includes Dandridge the curator, and Berigan the patient in the asylum. That night, a tiny snake statue grows large and bites Berigan, killing him in his locked asylum cell. Margaret/Tera confronts Dandrige: she wants her artifacts returned. He runs out through the fire escape and Tod follows him. Dandrige winds up like the others, with his throat torn open.
Tod runs home and tells Margaret to stop what she’s been doing before she gets killed as well. He plans to stop her, but Margaret says “Don’t or you’re dead!” Tod dies in a car crash immediately after. Fuchs and Corbeck have an interminably long dialogue about the inevitability of Margaret becoming Tera. Margaret kills Dr. Putnam and runs to the psychic lady we saw earlier. The woman hurries to give back the cat statue that Tera wants, but the cat kills her anyway.
We see that Fuchs has the still-moving hand in a box. Corbeck takes the hand and places it on Tera’s lifeless body where it re-attaches. Margaret says Tera is ready for her resurrection. Fuchs says, “No! Don’t do it,” but she and Corbeck are determined. Fuchs finally convinces Margaret, and the two of them kill Corbeck. It’s too late, however, since Tera sits up. They wrestle over the dagger, and Tera is killed again…maybe.
Commentary
This gets my vote for slowest, talkiest, most boring Hammer film. There’s just an incredible amount of talking with almost no action. There’s no mummy, not really; just a healthy-looking girl laying in a sarcophagus who makes people die from beyond the grave. And there’s something to do with the stars of the big dipper that are never explained in the film.
The people who die are killed by her artifacts that want to be reunited with their owner. If you’re expecting to see big shambling monster, or at least someone wrapped in bandages, there’s none of that here. Just don’t.