Director Lee Sholem earned a reputation for cranking them out fast and cheap – he made around 1300 film and television episodes and earned the nickname “Roll ’em” Sholem for his brisk pace. He brinks a sprightliness to Pharaoh’s Curse that is notably absent in its double-bill mate, Reginald LeBorg’s tedious Voodoo Island (1957) though in truth it really isn’t that much better. It’s a sort of throwback to the Universal mummy films though it doesn’t actually feature any mummies as such.

Egypt, 1902. The British Empire is in peril. Not only has the British Army been overrun by American B-movie actors doing little to disguise their native accents (though Terence De Marney is on hand to keep the British end up), but Cairo has erupted into violence as the city is gripped by riots. The cause of the unrest is an unauthorised archaeological expedition to the Valley of the Kings in search of the lost tomb of Rahateb led by Robert Quentin (George N. Neise). Captain Storm (Mark Dana) is assigned to lead a mission to retrieve the expedition, taking with him Quentin’s wife Sylvia (Diane Brewster). Along the way, the group meet Simira (Ziva Rodann, credited here as Ziva Shapir), a local woman who claims that her brother Numar (Alvaro Guillot) is helping the expedition. When they arrive at the tomb, they find that it’s been opened and that Numar had collapsed. The mummy that they’ve uncovered goes missing (the paw prints of a cat are found next to the sarcophagus) and Numar begins to age rapidly. Bloodless bodies start turning up and the group realise that Numar has been possessed by a hight priest who had been mummified after committing ritual suicide, bound by a three-thousand year curse to guard the tomb against all intruders.

Sholem makes reasonably good use of the Death Valley locations (though they never resemble anything to be found in the real Egypt) and he keeps the mystery simmering along quite nicely which automatically makes it more interesting than Voodoo Island. It has a better monster too – possession by mummy is a neat idea and the make-up, if not exactly stellar, does the job nicely. The rapidly ageing and desiccating monster with vampiric touches (it feeds off the blood of its victims) is more fun than most of those found in late 50s low-budget American genre films.

The script is the work of Richard Landau who had done so well with Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), although there he had the safety net of a set of peerless Nigel Kneale scripts from the BBC television serial to work from. Left to his own devices he came up with things like Lost Continent (1951), Voodoo Island, Frankenstein 1970 (1958) and more episodic television scripts than you can shake a stick at. He’s on slightly better form than usual here – the story zips along nicely and is never dull, unlike Voodoo Island which staggers from one stultifying bit of business to the next in the vain hope that Boris Karloff can hold it all together. Like that film, Landau ties Pharaoh’s Curse up a bit too neatly with characters simply accepting all the strangeness they’ve experienced with a metaphorical shrug of the shoulders but there’s some fun to be had in the journey there, unlike the cheerless slog of Voodoo Island.

The cast are mostly old B-movie hands who do what’s required of them and nothing more. Israeli actress Ziva Rodann cuts the most interesting figure, the ethereal Simira, revealed at the last moment to be the human form of the Egyptian lioness goddess Bastet. The late reveal robs Rodann (who later turned up on television’s Batman (1966-1968) as arch-villain Nefertiti alongside Victor Buono’s King Tut) of the chance to make something more of her role but she’s still the most memorably striking of a competent if unremarkable cast.

The film is equally unremarkable, but it’s an entertaining one. It doesn’t really get going until the second half, but the monster is impressive, the acting decent enough and the story engaging. It’s no masterpiece to be sure but as a 66-minute time-waster it fits the bill well enough. It shouldn’t be high on anyone’s “must see” list but in the unlikely event that a brisk, silly but occasionally inventive not-quite-mummy film is just what you’re looking for then this might just be what will scratch that particular itch.