An ailing professor, believing in the old gods of Egypt, demands to be buried with a priceless jewel. He believes that on the night of the first full moon following his death, his soul will be able to offer the jewel to Anubis, who will then open for him the gates of paradise. Near death, he also lays out a terrible curse; he will return to kill anyone who steals the jewel from his tomb.

For many years, this film was considered lost to the ages, fortunately, an intact print was eventually found. Well, fortunate enough. This film has one or two excellent segments, however, the rest of it is sadly lacking.

There is some good work on display here, the cinematography, while no match for some of the Universal horrors, is appropriately dark and shadowy, and some scenes are perfectly eerie. Karloff is always good, even when hamming it up as the desiccated Egyptologist ( Oh Lord is his makeup ugly! The good kind of ugly!), and the film features a large role for Ernest Thesiger a.k.a. Dr. Pretorius of ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ fame.

SPOILER WARNING!

The main problem here, is that there’s just not much story to go around. The main plot is essentially;

In order to stretch out the proceedings, the filmmakers unfortunately decided to add a silly little “Old Dark House” style subplot involving , oh I really wasn’t keeping track. There’s a couple of really flighty women, the dashing young hero who falls for one of them despite the fact that they don’t like each other very much, and some sort of Byzantine conspiracy involving Muslim assassins, phony vicars, dishonest lawyers, and dynamite. It sounds kinda interesting, but after the setup of Karloff promising to come back from the grave, you’ll just feel like you’re watching 53 minutes of nothing, waiting for that promise to be fulfilled.

This is the crippling problem with the film, there is some really good stuff here (I.e. any scene with Boris), but it’s been completely suffocated under a mountain of fluffy innocuous padding. If you have a taste for old melodrama, this might be worth a rental, but there’s not enough Karloff here to satisfy folks like me.