I think I've got one more movie left from Charlton Heston's time as TCM's Star of the Month, and I wanted to make sure I watched it before it ran off the DVR. That movie is The Awakening.
The opening credits thank Egypt and a bunch of organizations in the country, also showing scenes from some part of the Nile well upstream from Cairo. We then get to the action, "Eighteen Years Ago", at an archeologicl dig. The dig is being led by British professor Matthew Corbeck (Charlton Heston), who has brought his wife Anne (Jill Townsend) along with him. She's seven months pregnant, so not exactly well-suited to being in such an archeological camp. But she's got a simmering disagreement with her husband about his neglect for her. Indeed, he seems far more interested in his assistant Jane (Susannah York), who is definitely interested in him.
The two are there with all their assistants because of something Matthew read from a Dutch archeology who was writing a century or more ago. That man, van Horn, heard legends about a mythical Egyptian queen, who like King Tutankhamen, died young. If she existed, the belief is that she would be in the valley where they are, although watercourses change over millennia, so who really knows. One day, Matthew and Jane go out alone farther into the valley, and a rockslide reveals some ancient hieroglphyics that somehow survived. The inscriptions suggest that this is the right place, but with an important caveat: the place is cursed if anybody should violate the grave.
Needless to say, Matthew and Jane don't believe in such curses, so they go ahead with opening up the rock face and seeing what's behind it. As they do, Anne goes into labor back at the camp. Matthew finds Anne in pain back at the camp and rushes her to the hospital, where it's strongly implied the baby is a stillbirth, as they cover it with a sheet and won't show it to Anne. But then Matthew and Jane open up the sarcophagus, and the baby, a little girl, is suddenly revealed not to be dead after all!
That's all enough for Anne to be fed up with Matthew, so she takes their daughter Margaret and goes off to America, divorcing Matthew. We then transfer to the present. Margaret is 18, and Dad would like to see her. Margaret (Stephanie Zimbalist), for her part, is curious to meed Dad, so it's off to London, where Dad has re-married Jane.
At the same time, there's some disturbing news about the mummy that was in the sarcophagus Matthew and Jane opened up 18 years prior. There's the possiblity that bacteria have gotten into the hermetically sealed, climate-controlled case in which the mummy has been places. Also, an eclipse hits, and that causes things to get more crazy with the mummy.
People start dying, and Matthew gets the sinking feeling that perhaps the old queen's curse was accurate and that the queen's soul has entered Margaret's body. Matthew thinks some sort of exorcism might be in order. But at the same time, people around Margaret start dying in all sorts of terrible ways reminiscent of The Omen from a few years earlier. Is Matthew right about the queen taking over Margaret? If so, will he be able to reverse it?
The Awakening is based on a novel by Bram Stoker, who is of course much better remembered for Dracula. Having seen this movie, it's no surprise that Dracula is remembered. The Awakening isn't exactly a bad movie; it's more that it feels like it's not terribly original. There's a lot that reminded me of The Omen, as I mentioned earlier, but also a lot that would have been in any of the other older mummy films.
Still, for fans of horror, The Awakening is worth one watch.
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