The Cursed Palace (1962)

Original title: El-Qasr el-Maloon

Young Lawyer Hasan (Salah Zulfikar) comes to the mansion of Fahmi Bey (Mahmoud El Meligy) to help the rich yet virtuous man sign over most of his wealth to his daughter Yusriyyah (Mariam Fakhr Eddine). The film never explains why this can’t be handled via a will, so I assume the contemporary Egyptian audience would have known why and just take this as a given. Hasan and Yusriyyah very quickly fall in deep, pulpy looking book-trading, love with one another. The business aspect goes well enough, or so it seems, despite Fahmi Bey’s sister being pretty disgruntled losing out on her future inheritance.

But then, one dark and stormy night – Egypt’s very windy in this movie – Yusriyyah finds the dead body of her father, only to encounter a very alive version of the same shortly after. Not surprisingly, this freaks her out rather badly. Her state of mind is not at all improved by the various hauntings she then experiences – skeletal hands at her window, the face of her father where it can’t be, that sort of thing. About half a day later, Yusriyyah is in no mental state to sign any documents that might make her very rich indeed, and her rambling about her father who is dead while she is standing right next to a very living one sitting in his wheelchair is not helping her case at all. Fortunately, Hasan starts investigating, while creepy things continue to happen in the mansion.

I suspect even in 1962, an audience wouldn’t have fallen for anything of what is going on in Hasan Redha’s The Cursed Palace as actually supernatural. We are very much in old dark house territory here, the sort of Old Hollywood set-up Egyptian popular cinema as far as I understand it was very comfortable with. Apart from this type of creaky yet always fun thriller, there’s also a clear influence of the kind of thriller that would follow in its stops, and it wouldn’t be difficult to put The Cursed Palace next to, for example, the kind of post-Psycho thriller Jimmy Sangster wrote for Hammer when they weren’t doing gothic horror.

Stylistically, however, this is a horror movie through and through, praying at the altar of Universal, full of creaking windows, dramatic coach rides, improbably large expressionist shadows, Dutch angles and a camera that seems forever located low, shooting upwards, turning reticent servants into figures of menace. Right at the end, there’s also a sequence that feels as if it were taken directly from a giallo, when the black-gloved villain of the piece, in nearly subjective camera, goes for his final, plot-deciding, murder attempt.

Like most of the handful of Egyptian movies of the era I’ve seen, The Cursed Palace is a stylishly shot, well-acted – in the highly melodramatic manner befitting its material – and well-paced film that’s a joy to watch, uniting some specifics of its place and time with internationally popular ideas about genre filmmaking, and thus a very nice entry into its niche of horror.

Fangs (1981)

Original title: Anyab

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a young couple, planning to get married (after they’ll find an appropriately cheap apartment), find themselves stranded in the countryside during a rain storm. Thanks to a helpful yet somewhat sinister hunchback, they make their way to a creepy – yet awesome – mansion. There’s a very peculiar party going on inside, and the host tries to sweep the female part of the couple right off her feet.

Only in this case, the party is a masquerade of vampires who like to wear Halloween masks, and the host isn’t a sweet transvestite but Dracula (Ahmed Adawiyya).

Mohammed Shebl’s pretty mind-blowing horror musical comedy Fangs is the sort of thing we would have described as “psychotronic” in ye olden times. Produced on a low (low low low) budget but gifted with the nearly manic enthusiasm of a true believer in the power of popular cinema, this takes elements of Western pop culture and puts them through the blender of a very personal set of interests and obsessions in a cultural remix. The influences, quotes and re-works start with the obvious Rocky Horror (minus the LGBTQ material, though I suspect because this would have been a bridge too far for an Egyptian movie, not because Shebl didn’t want to), move over to Dracula (there’s an incredibly awesome-awkward restaging of the Count crawling up a wall you need to see to believe and love), and certainly do not end at using cheaper versions of the Biff! Bang! Pow! thought bubbles of the Batman TV show.

Shebl must have had quite the encyclopaedic knowledge of and nerdy interest in very different forms of – mostly US and British - pop culture, for his quotes and interests reach from the most obvious to the obscure. I can’t quite speak to the way these elements interact with the specifically Egyptian and probably pretty political parts of the movie, but forty years later and many kilometres away, there’s no mistaking -  this is a film made with total love for the material it borrows from.

Shebl also carries in his heart a sweet and probably abiding love for the fourth wall break: the plot, such as it is, is regularly interrupted by a gentleman in his private library who at first focusses on exposition and melodramatic pronouncements like a very serious horror host but eventually gets into a discussion with Dracula on the reality of vampires. Which in turn leads to the narrative coming to a screeching halt in favour of a number of absurdist skits that suggest a rather clear connection between vampires and capitalism.

In the main plot, Dracula will get into trouble for his autocratic leadership style as well, so even this non-80s-Egyptian viewer smells a degree of satire there.

However, between the fourth wall breaking, the quotes and everything, this is also a gorgeous, often utterly bizarre horror musical that makes up for a certain lack of budget through the virtues of imagination and natural weirdness. The film’s actual music should be on various hipster turn tables with its mix of disco, “Egyptian”-sounding percussion, synths and vocal lines that remind me more than a little of 70s Bollywood. Shebl needle-drops a variety of certainly copyrighted music as well, and there are as many clever gags based in the use of borrowed music as there are visual ones.

From time to time, Fangs even puts some emphasis on the “horror” bit of its multi-genre descriptors, and suddenly there’s genuinely icky vampire gore between the songs and the general strangeness. Clearly, Shebl liked a lot of things, and aimed to put them all on screen in the same movie – one never knows if it isn’t one’s first and only, after all.

Three Films Make A Post: It's a cold, cruel world - but Jackson can hack it!

Fresh (2022): I’m not as excited about Mimi Cave’s variation on common horror tropes as quite a few other viewers seem to be, mostly because adding a bit of gloss to keep a more mainstream audience watching something usually done sordid doesn’t seem to be much of an achievement to me, and does not for a terribly interesting movie make to these eyes. I also found the film’s feminism very superficial and pretty bland, not really adding further insight to anyone’s view of the world nor doing much I haven’t seen before to the tropes of its sub-genre. It’s certainly well-filmed and well-acted (with Daisy Edgar-Jones giving a likeable turn, and Sebastian Stan giving the oversize crazy performance every filmography needs) on a technical level, but it’s also twenty to thirty minutes too long. Particularly the never-ending (and not in a good way) climax is a problem here.

Unmasked Part 25 (1988): Anders Palm’s very low budget slasher comedy romance from several decades earlier is rather more creative with the tropes of its sub-genre, providing many a moment of handmade gore as an additional attraction, thinking through and against the basics of the slashers genre, skewering bodies as well as poetry-quoting self-serious sad sack men, and actually building a world for his slasher (Gregory Cox) to inhabit. The jokes here are trying to hit on every level, from making fun of genre tropes – be they horror or romantic comedy – to peculiar sex jokes to plain deadpan weirdness, and as is par for the course for the shotgun approach, not all of them hit. But there are so many of them, you’re already laughing or shaking your head at the next one.

Bride of the Nile aka Arouss el Nil (1963): Practically everything I’ve seen of classic Egyptian movies like this romantic fantasy comedy by Fatin Abdulwahhab fits very much in style and taste to classic Hollywood formulas, and it’s very easy to imagine a US version of this tale of a grave-disturbing engineer (Abdel Moneim Ibrahim) first being haunted by and then falling in love with the spirit of the last bride of the Nile (Lobna Abdel Aziz) without many changes to the script or the filmmaking. We don’t actually need a US version, happily, for the film at hand is really all you could want from the kind of whimsical, fantastical romance this material promises, with many a superimposed image of Lobna Abdel Aziz waving her hands so that some telekinesis can happen, the expected assortment of musical numbers and pretty great costumes, and a general sense of fancy that never seems to get tired or old.

Ismail Yassin in the House of Ghosts (1952)

Original title: ‘إسماعيل يس في بيت الأشباح

You know the drill: a bunch of more or less peculiar relatives are gathered in the house of a far-flung uncle or some such living out in the boons for the reading of his will. In it, he bequeaths his money in equal share to everyone gathered as long as they stay together in the house for – in this particular case – a month. Since this is a horror comedy, there’s only a little murder involved in the following proceedings, but intrigue and many a scene of people being frightened by ghosts as well as the obligatory romance between two members of the younger generation ensues. There’s also a gorilla we see rather a lot of. And quite the gorilla it is, as played by some poor guy stuffed into a costume that I can only read as looking as absurdly un-gorilla-like as it does for comical effect, given that the rest of the production looks pretty spiffy. But then, you never know with gorillas costumes.

Fortunately, cousin Lionheart (Ismail Yassin) – apparently he legally changed his name into this more heroic/silly moniker – is a well-travelled parody of the Great White Hunter trope, arriving with his own tribe of racist caricature African tribespeople (who, to the film’s defence, will turn out to be caricatures because they are a fake African tribe, which alas still doesn’t make them funny). But hey, Lionheart should be able to do away with a single gorilla, right? Too bad that he isn’t actually a great hunter – the film never explains why he feels the need to fake it so your guess is as good as mine – and so spends too much of the film’s running time monkeying around with the ape.

Eventually, somewhat more interesting things happen, as ghosts appear, an actual murder occurs (hooray!), and…a Scooby Doo ending rears its ugly, misshapen head, the true horror of the age.

Reading this, one might think I wasn’t terribly keen on this outing of popular Egyptian comedian Ismail Yassin as directed by Fatin Abdel Wahab, but I was enjoying myself watching this more often than I was not. People who have seen more than this one Yassin movie tell me that this isn’t one of his better ones. Apparently, he doesn’t typically fulfil the bumbling fool comedy role this directly, and I can see myself watching more films with him if that’s the case. In any case, Yassin has impeccable comical timing even in the lamer jokes, getting laughs out of more of the monkey business than it actually deserves.

The film gets decidedly better once the gorilla becomes less important to its plot, too, evolving into your typical series of scenes of people running around screeching after encountering ghosts, people stumbling upon secret doors, some mild stripping, a musical number and a pretty fantastic dream sequence that works more by being comically surreal than via pratfalls. That’s not exactly deep or subversive entertainment, but it’s about what I expect to get out of an old dark house movie. It’s certainly miles above poverty row US ones, being always clearly made to entertain by whatever means possible.

The ghosts for their part are pretty effectively realized, the gentleman in the old-timey Arabian outfit walking around with his head in his hand being the obvious darling of the film. It’s never so much they’ll be even slightly scary to a modern audience, but they feel fun, funny, and imaginative enough I’d have loved to see a film in which they were real. But it’s an old dark house movie, so one expects to be attacked by Scooby Doo.

Rather typical for what I know of Egyptian commercial films of this era, the whole affair, even when it’s the tenth scene of Yassin versus Gorilla, looks wonderful, clearly flirting with classic pre-50s Hollywood cinema through a combination of technical chops and an obvious love of glamour; the non-gorilla effects are simple yet great, and the acting has the precise, stylized yet generally not awkward quality of pre-Method Hollywood.


It’s not a great movie, but it certainly turned out to be enough to entertain me on a rainy October night shortly before Halloween.

In short: Dawn of the Mummy (1981)

An obsessed fashion photographer drags a group of stupid models out into the Egyptian desert, far away from the usual tourist centres. There, they stumble into the territory of three stupid grave robbers hard at work plundering the hidden tomb of an especially nasty mummy.

How stupid are those grave robbers? So stupid that they can't prevent a fashion shoot from taking place in the tomb they're working in. Why a fashion photographer would want to shoot in the shabby thing is beyond me anyway. My thoughts about the art of fashion photography notwithstanding, there will be photographing.

The opening of the tomb had already woken up the mummy guy, but he's getting more active as soon as more potential victims arrive.

I don't think the mummy likes fashion photography. At least, it is always oozing stinky looking fluids when the shoots (and those take days) take place, possibly in an allergic reaction to the stupidity cooties floating all around it.

Anyway, after hours and hours, the mummy begins its mandatory killing spree, teleporting hither and yon. And it is not alone - it has a small army of (also teleporting) zombies in its service who are very useful when the time comes to attack a nice, Egyptian village.

Dawn of the Mummy belongs to the especially dreadful type of movie that is intensely boring and uninteresting for much of its running time, but jolts a awake for short bouts of excitement. It's neither a very useful film to sleep by, nor one that's bound to keep enthralled and excited.

Most of the film belongs to the (very 80s) scenes of a boring guy photographing bored looking women who can't act, said boring persons who still can't act emoting some relationship stuff most soap operas would realize in a more exciting way and good Cthulhu, is this stuff tedious! Then, when you think you can just pop the DVD out again and watch the Weather Channel instead, the mummy dispatches of someone in a gory and ridiculous way while its victim makes some of the loudest, yet most preposterous sounding dying noises ever committed to screen or tape, after which it's back to the soap operatics for the quarter of an hour.

And suddenly, for the last fifteen minutes or so, the movie transforms into a ridiculous but neat zombie attack. First they drop in on a wedding and then visit a whole village in scenes full of spirited gut-munching, more screeching, and dynamite-throwing models. In other words, Dawn of the Mummy becomes absolutely fabulous, as if director Frank Agrama had suddenly remembered that he a) has quite an (un)healthy macabre imagination or b) can steal ideas from other, better movies to make his own less sleep-inducing.

Oh yeah, the zombie and mummy make-up looks quite neat, too.

 

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