John Banning (David O’Hara) is a treasure hunter who deals in the pilfering and selling of stolen antiquities from Egyptian tombs. John and his partner, Tyler (Craig Hamann) are approached by a man named Youssef (Emanuel Shipow) with a proposition. Youssef takes John and Tyler to an unnamed tomb that had been hidden for centuries and only came to light after an earthquake. The tomb has very little artifacts in it, a few statues, the sarcophagus, and a few smaller items.
Youssef tells the guys a story about Nefratis, the illegitimate daughter of a great pharaoh. She became a priestess of Seti and drank human blood. It gave her magic powers and perpetual youth. Her father was so disgusted that he had her buried alive in an unmarked tomb. It was feared that Nefratis was so powerful that her dark life force would never die.
The sarcophagus in the abandoned tomb contains the priestess. Now that her tomb has been disturbed Nefratis comes back to life and kills Youssef and Tyler. Banning manages to escape with a couple artifacts and returns to Los Angeles. The vampire priestess follows him.
Banning sells his artifacts to a couple collectors. One artifact, the golden scarab of Osiris, he sells to Dr. Manners (Jack Frankel) and the other, an amulet of the Eye of Horus, to Dr. Howard Phillips (Cameron Mitchell). Nefratis finds Banning in a seedy hotel room. She places a scarab inside his chest up against his heart. The scarab turns Banning into her slave forcing him to tell her where her sacred items are. Nefratis kills both Manners and Phillips to get back her possessions. Manners’ son, David (Richard Hench), and Phillips’ niece, Helen (Suzy Stokey), get together to try to find out who committed the murders.
“The Tomb” was released in 1986 and was directed by Fred Olen Ray. It is a supernatural horror film with comedy elements.
The film started because Director Ray had access to an elaborate temple setting that was used in a Wrangler’s Jeans commercial. Rather than have the set go to waste, he commissioned a story to be written that would use the set as a jumping off point.
The main baddie in the film is a female quasi mummy-vampire hybrid called Nefratis. She doesn’t wear the traditional mummy wrappings, but she does sport some nice vampire fangs. She can also emit electrical beams from her hands. She also uses Banning as a sort of zombie slave, so the film uses the vampire, mummy and zombie elements but not in the traditional way.
There are many references to the film being based on Bram Stoker’s 1903 novel “The Jewel of the Seven Stars”. I haven’t read the book, but any synopses I’ve ever seen of the book are different from the plot of this film. I’ve also seen references to the F. Paul Wilson novel “The Tomb”. The title of the film is the same as the title of the book but that is the only similarity. Director Ray used the title in anticipation of New World Cinema doing a film version of Wilson’s book. Ray was hoping to capitalize on New World’s story by selling the rights to the title but New World ultimately decided to abandon their film. All’s well that ends well though since Ray managed to convince Trans World Entertainment to front the money he needed to do his film.