If you think the title of The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals is clumsy, wait until you see the movie. No, really — as the crosswalks for the blind warn aloud every few seconds, wait!
The final film (at least that weren’t X-rated) for Western director Oliver Drake, the tacky Jackals finds archaeologist Dave (Anthony Eisley, The Doll Squad) obsessed with the well-preserved corpse of an Egyptian princess (belly dancer Marliza Pons) with a breastplate apparently made of Cinnabons. Dave asks his pal, Bob (Robert Alan Browne, Psycho III), to lock him inside for the night: “What could possibly happen?” Dave says. “This is Nevada, good ol’ USA.”
Yeah, even though a full moon is out (I see a bad movie rising), it’s not like he’s gonna catch the curse of the jackals.
Dave catches the curse of the jackals. This means his hands turn into paws that appear inflated to 45 psi and he dons the werewolf head from the same year’s sexploitation oddity, Dracula (the Dirty Old Man), which shares writer/producer William Edwards. On his first outing, Jackal Dave slays a couple of cops who scream out of sync.
On the plus side, the princess resurrects! Although her face looks like an unfinished clay sculpture, Human Dave is entranced and informs her of double-date plans: “You better change. Bob and Donna want to have dinner with us,” he says, before teaching her about bras. Meeting Bob and Donna (TV actress Maurine Dawson) at a steakhouse, he introduces the pharaoh’s daughter using the nom de plume of Connie: “She’s not from here. She comes from … back east.”
Meanwhile, a pop-eyed mummy (Saul Goldsmith) in grubby bandages awakens, strangles a stripper, busts through a paper-thin wall, interrupts the steakhouse’s stage show, kidnaps Connie and limps down the Vegas strip without a film permit as onlookers laugh. You’ll relate.
With John Carradine cameoing as a professor and painfully inert flashbacks to 4,800 years prior, The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals is a howl and a half. That’s in spite of — or because of — slapdash editing and snuff-film lighting that look paid for by a bucket of coins swiped from Marge from Boise at the penny slots. —Rod Lott