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.