La Malédiction du pharaon

I seldom stop a movie part-way through and refuse to watch the rest of it. "The Curse of King Tut's Tomb" provoked that exact reaction. It tries to be an action movie and fails. It attempts, badly, to imitate elements of both "Mummy" pictures and falls v-e-r-y short. It desperately tries to grab onto parts of the "Indiana Jones" series and misses the mark every single time.

The acting varies widely from stilted, to just plain amateurish. Any resemblance to historical accuracy is fleeting, at best, and CG work is about on a par with a talented child wielding an Etch-A-Sketch.

The only reason I can fathom for hanging on to this DVD is to use as a coaster when you get unexpected company. I can only imagine that Messers McDowell and Hyde desperately needed work. They should have been more discriminating.

The Director, Russell Mulcahy, seems to be on a role at this point. His version of "Mysterious Island" (2005) suffered from similar shortcomings and is another Movie Worth Missing. It is interesting to note that both "Mysterious Island" and "The Curse of King Tut's Tomb" were produced for The Hallmark Channel. Thankfully Hallmark greeting cards are much better than their movies.

If you see this movie coming on, go floss your cat's teeth. It will be much more productive.

I've always thought I was one of the more forgiving movie viewers in the country, but I just can't describe how bad this movie is. The "Egyptology" described in the terribly written introduction voice-over must be from not a parallel universe, but a skewed one, because it certainly has nothing to do with this one. The dialog is just atrocious. The acting could have been good -- I choose to believe this because the bad directing so completely overwhelmed any performance talent that evidence of acting ability is completely undetectable. The characters would have to be improved to be two dimensional. The pacing was haphazard at best. I can't remember the editing, so it must have been better than the other aspects of the film. I wish Joe Bob Briggs was still reviewing movies, because that's the most entertainment anyone could hope for from this film.

One of the most fascinating things about this film (apart from Jonathan Hyde's extraordinary resemblance with Henry Daniell)is watching how the plot meanders and wanders with no destination in sight as if it were an Art Nouveau filigrain.

I suspect that the archeology academics would seriously object at the unorthodox -but revolutionary- system that the protagonist and his buddies use to find the legendary Pharaoh's tomb, namely, by sitting in the terraces of Cairo's seediest bars and leaving them without alcoholic stock. Their interest is, however, scientific, except for the legionnaire buddy who is more interested in gold statuettes accidentally getting lost in his greatcoat pockets (Having mentioned the legionnaire, I must say that I admire the courage of the scriptwriter, who reveals to us -for the very first time- that Egypt was at the time a French protectorate, and not, as we've been led to believe by the official history, associated to the British empire)

The bad guys stick to the old, slow, boring system of studying the terrain and excavating carefully according to old Ieroglyphs, while our hero and his friends discover the tomb the legendary grave by happily throwing dynamite sticks at random: a new path is opened thus for archeology.

My son is 8 and he enjoyed it. At three hours it was a too long for me, but I remember watching Tarzan movies for hours on Saturday mornings when I was his age, including those awful Mike Henry in South America Tarzan movies. This was better than those. So, even though I didn't like it much, I'm glad movies are still being made that a kid can watch and get lost in. One thing I thought was puzzling, they kept introducing characters that they never really did anything with. Steven Waddington was the only supporting character that managed to shine. The history was of course pretty silly, but they "fixed" that at the end. It made my son want to know more, so we went on the web and looked up what really happened. Definitely a "B" movie, with limited special effects and wooden acting, but still fun for kids.

This is not "The Lord of The Rings" by any means and is not even the best work of Director Russell Mulcahy. And there were far too many natives of India trying to pass as Egyptians. Having said that I found this film to be good escapism entertainment if you realize that they are not trying to present any kind of historical fact. One of the best ways to sum it up is to imagine Indiana Jones on the cheap. Casper Van Dien is always fun to watch once you accept his natural cockiness and are pulled into his ability to be comic and serious at the same time.

Johnathan Hyde is always excellent either as hero (ala "Richie Rich) or as villain, and he seems to be fated to play these evil archaeologist types recently. And Malcolm McDowell is always superb. But the winner in this film was the sets, props and the soundtrack. The film was worth that alone. Still, a tighter shot film in a shorter time frame might have made it all work better. Not Oscar material by a long shot, but worth the time if you have nothing better to do.