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6 Do You Mind If I Smoke?
“Pyramids Of Mars” (1975)
Poor old Namin. He's been faithfully doing his duty for his master Sutekh, and what thanks does he get? Sutekh reanimates the corpse of an English explorer, sends it through a time portal and gets it to kill Namin using some smokier version of the Vulcan death grip. It's the details here that make things so scary: the Hammer-esque mansion setting, the organ music, the Edwardian costumes, the smoke, the pulsating mummy casket, the swirling colours of the time portal, the blank-faced mask of Sutekh's servant. Everything adds up to an exquisitely intense moment. But the smoking hand prints - they're the best bit.
Big screen relatives: While the story as a whole clearly has its roots in early Universal and Hammer Horror mummy flicks (before Stephen Sommers turned the genre into a Tex Avery cartoon) , this scene resembles more the "summoning up a demon and then immediately regretting it" scenarios so beloved of Clive Barker in the likes of Hellraiser and Candyman.
5 Mr Sin Comes To Life
"The Talons Of Weng Chiang" (1977)
We've had our suspicions. There was something definitely not right about that ventriloquist's dummy, and not just the fact that it had blood on its hand either. Evil-looking thing, it was. And there was something in its eyes. And then, good grief, it comes alive and starts stalking Leela with a knife. That was no dummy, it was a Peking Homunculus - a 51st Century cyborg toy with the cerebral cortex of a pig. Which seems a bit like giving your kids a robot rottweiller to play with.
Big screen relatives: A direct descendent is the evil ventriloquist dummy that terrorises Anthony Hopkins in 1978's Magic, but Chucky is also from then same lineage.
