a5c7b9f00b On his death bed, Egyptologist Professor Henry Morlant orders his servant to wrap a valuable jewel in his hand and place a statue of Anubis along with his body in the family crypt. His hope is that Anubis will accept the diamond and allow Morlant to pass through to the afterlife. When someone steals the jewel from his tomb, Morlant rises from the dead justhe predicted he would and seeks his revenge. The heirs to his estate, Ralph Morlant and his cousin Betty Harlon and her friend Miss Kaney arrive at the estate justtheir uncle rises from his grave. With the assistant of the butler, the local minister Nigel Hartley, the elder Morlants solicitor Mr. Broughton and an Egyptian, Aga Ben Dragore, they try to make sense of what is happening and determine who among them has stolen the jewel. An Egyptologist returns from the dead to take revenge on those who have violated his tomb. Long thought lost, several prints of this early British horror effort eventually turned up; first a worn, cut, subtitled nitrate print in Prague and then an uncut master print in England. The good news is that the 2003 MGM DVD release is taken from the latter and has been wonderfully restored, giving new life to a once written-off classic era horror film. The bad news is that the film itself just isn&#39;t all that good. It&#39;s poorly written, leadenly paced and fails to really bring anything novel or all that interesting to a tired formula, coming offlittle more than a middling attempt to emulate the Universal classics. In fact, the film is essentially just a mix of THE MUMMY and one of those hoary &quot;old dark house&quot; comic melodramas popular at the time. The results are highly uneven.<br/><br/>Dying Egyptologist Professor Henry Morlant (Boris Karloff) demands to be buried with a valuable &quot;eternal light&quot; jewel wrapped in his hand, warning that if it&#39;s removed he will return from the grave on a full moon and kill. Unfortunately he&#39;s put a bit too much trust in his club-footed butler Laing (Ernest Thesiger), who promptly steals the jewel before Morlant is entombed and hides it in a coffee tin. Meanwhile, Morlant&#39;s lawyer Mr. Broughton (Cedric Hardwicke) writes letters to the two sole heirs - grandson Ralph (Anthony Bushell) and niece Betty (Dorothy Hyson) - and arranges for them to arrive at the candle-lit mansion for a reading of the will. Also showing up there are Betty&#39;s chatty roommate Kaney (Kathleen Harrison), parson Nigel Hartley (Sir Ralph Richardson, in his film debut) and Morlant&#39;s friend and colleague Aga Ben Dragore (Harold Huth). Coincidentally, there&#39;s a full moon that same night and Professor Morlant returns to life and begins his search the grounds for the jewel he believes will unite him with the jackal-headed God Anubis.<br/><br/>After a very strong and stylized opening 25 minutes, the film takes an unfortunate turn toward blandsville and never seems to recover. There are too many slow talky scenes, grating comedy elements (notably the hysterical, shrill Kaney) and uninteresting characters aimlessly wandering around. The conclusion is also disappointing,it makes almost no sense in context to what we&#39;d seen earlier. Karloff&#39;s &quot;ghoul&quot; makeup (obviously inspired by his look in THE MUMMY) is OK, but consists mainly of wrinkly skin, under-eye circles and bushy eyebrows, and the actor is relegated to little more than a minor player after the first ten minutes. The main pluses here come on the production side of things. Louis Levy and Leighton Lucas provide a good score and there&#39;s some outstanding Egyptian-themed art direction from Alfred Junge. Best of all is Günther Krampf&#39;s cinematography. The film is very darkly lit, but the photography has a creepy silent era/expressionistic quality about it at times and makes excellent use of shadow and silhouette,wellfog during some atmospherically-shot scenes on a hazy London street. A tricky one to review in some ways, for someone like myself who loves to submerge himself in anything Noir, Expressionistic or Gothic. There&#39;s also the added impact value here of the cast list, with Karloff, Hardwicke, Thesiger and Richardson making a quadruple list of British treasures. While of course there&#39;s the not so small fact that the film was sort of lost for decades, and even when it surfaced it was the victim of some awful transfers onto home entertainment formats. So it has been like discovering a Holy Grail of Karloff movies to finally have it available with a very good transfer.<br/><br/>The Ghoul is very uneven and it takes the slow-burn approach to the extreme, even rendering much of the filmponderous. A better director than T. Hayes Hunter could have made this story work, which in essence is a bit of a &quot;Mummy&quot; clone in all but name. It&#39;s crammed with characters musing about the plot dynamics, which is pointless because we have grasped very early on in the play what we need to know. There&#39;s some over acting, which again a better director would have reined in, while the action sequences are poorly constructed. But…<br/><br/>It looks absolutely terrific. In the pantheon of Old Dark House movies, this is top draw. Günther Krampf photographs it with his Germanic Expressionistic badge pinned firmly on his chest. Boasting Nosferatu and Pandora&#39;s Boxphotographic assignments on his CV, Krampf blitzes The Ghoul with such atmosphere and mood setting skills, his work really deserves a far better movie. It&#39;s creaky for the wrong reasons, and it very much proves to be a product of its time, but it&#39;s an important movie in the history of British horror. These things, coupled with the photography, make it one you need to at least see and tick of your list. 5/10
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