Love Brides of the Blood Mummy (1973)

Now that’s what you call a movie title…worthy of Tony Tenser in the amount of buzzwords they managed to cram into just the one title. There is a definite anglophile leaning to Love Brides of the Blood Mummy, an eccentric Spanish/French co-production that looks to Hammer horror for inspiration, somehow encompassing elements from their Frankenstein and Dracula series, in spite of this being a film about a mummy. For its third act, Love Brides of the Blood Mummy also becomes a crawling ‘severed hand’ movie, suggesting that Amicus weren’t immune from being pilfered from here either.

Spanish B-Movie veteran Frank Brana plays either an Egyptologist or a policeman pretending to be an Egyptologist (that particular plot point is never resolved) whose investigations take him to Dartmoor and the castle of the Earl of Dartmoor, a powerful occultist who can turn people to stone, magic up snakes and has the power over life and death. The Earl also fancies himself as Dartmoor’s answer to Baron Frankenstein and brings a lustful Egyptian mummy back to life. Soon of course, that plan backfires on the Earl, as the Mummy imprisons him in the castle’s dungeon, turns out to have vampire like tendencies, takes control of the Earl’s manservant John, and uses John to murder local wenches for their blood.

The person you most feel sorry for here is the poor sod playing the long suffering John, who despite being no spring chicken is given a role which requires him to get spat in the face, pelted with rocks, knocked off a ladder, thrown into a moat, climb a cliff face and get kicked in the nuts by the Mummy…who’d be a faithful manservant in ye olde Dartmoor. Compared to the actor playing the Mummy itself, who is relegated to leisurely pursuits like horse riding and molesting various women, or the actor that plays the Earl, who spends most of the film sitting behind bars, its clear which cast member has drawn the short straw here. Come to think about it, if the Earl of Dartmoor (he is sometimes referred to as ‘Count Dartmoor’ as well) is so powerful and a bigwig when it comes to magic…why doesn’t he do bugger all but sit in a jail cell for the majority of the movie, even while the Mummy is terrorizing his household and murdering various people, including a member of the Earl’s own family. The film’s depiction of Dartmoor doesn’t exactly hold up to close scrutiny either…then again some suspension of disbelief is called for here, especially since we're dealing with a film about a vampire, Egyptian mummy running loose on Dartmoor.

For a piece of Euro-horror that is now as obscure as they come…never making it to DVD or Blu-Ray and only surfacing on VHS in a Spanish language version (the VHS rip on Youtube has optional English subs) its surprising to discover that Love Brides of the Blood Mummy had a UK cinema release in 1973 as ‘Lips of Blood’. It also made it to Canada, two years later, as part of a Euro-sleaze double-bill with ‘Secret Love Life of the Invisible Man’…a Eurocine production more commonly known these days as The Invisible Dead or Orloff Against the Invisible Man. So, a dubbed English language version must have existed at some point, possibly with more nudity in it. The Spanish language version that is around these days does bear all the traces of being a ‘clothed’ version of the film, prepared for the censorious climate of 1970s Spain. Meaning the Mummy might get away with rape, flagellation and branding women in this version, but he remains gentlemanly enough to only strip them down to their bloomers while doing so. Of course if you have a thing for hysterical women wearing bloomers, that not even Mrs Slocombe’s antics in Are You Being Served can satisfy, this is the version for you. For everyone else…well as no other version of this film has ever re-surfaced…its bloomers for the rest of us as well!!!