The Seventh Scroll

It takes a lot of hard work to make a movie good, but it might take even more work to make one bad - really bad. In this gem everyone succeeds.

Let's not talk about plot holes here. Let's talk about craters instead. Ravines. And let's please talk about acting - and directing. The only halfway decent acting performance is by the colonel - or was it a general? And as for his name? It's not given here, so who knows? Credit for his piece de resistance is lost forever.

Roy Scheider? Why does he always get these horrible parts? Either he just can't land the good roles or he has terrible taste, and in this turkey he lands another good one and unless he's absolutely desperate for work (which the poor guy might be) he has terrible taste. Playing a heavy named - Grant Schiller? Schiller is German; Grant is not. Who comes up with these stupid names? Oh that's right: the singularly lacklustre Kevin Connor who has not a single impressive credit to his CV and also commits the ultimate insult of directing - or actually refraining from directing.

The absolute worst acting in the movie is by Katrina Gibson who shouldn't even be allowed on a sound stage to pluck litter. According to the IMDb, Gibson's been in an episode of Judging Amy. That must be the worst episode ever in that series.

Rounding everything out: you can't really have a bad bad movie unless the music is really stupid and annoying, but fortunately Canadian McCauley comes through with flying colours.

This one might work on slow kids in the five years of age range but hardly on anyone else. It will bore ten year olds and get them climbing the walls and screaming in protest.

Strangely we watched this one all through to the end. We were perversely fascinated by it, mostly and primarily because it was so bad. But recommend it to anyone? Why?

It takes a lot of work to make a bad movie, and this one succeeds in all possible ways. And it only makes you appreciate all the more how much work it takes to make a good movie.

Well, I've read the book first and thought: wow would this be cool to see in a movie, than I started searching and found there was already a movie made of it... I bought the movie a week ago on DVD and watched it.. they did it awfully wrong! at first this kid Hapi,who isn't any character in the book, then the mix between the two books ('the river god' and 'the seventh scroll') than Nicolas needing funds while in the book he himself is actually the funder, the whole thing about the Hyksos is wrong also.. Taila is supposed to have invented the lightweight-chariot.. the whole thing about the tomb is also very wrong.. there is supposed to be a channel that has some kind of vacuum-suction around it.. the tomb itself was made in a maze with only a possibility to pass if one knows the rules of the ancient boa-game. There was nothing in the movie about Nicolas being English and Royan was a Coptic-Christian in the book, not a Muslim..This list is endless.. There were only a few things good about the movie, the actors which played Royan, Nahood, Taita, Boris, Mick and Tessay were well-chosen, the rest were just parodies of the characters in the book, Rasfer was the worst, it didn't get even close to the character that was in my head while I wrote the book.. It is such a shame that such a great book is mutilated in such a bad reproduction... I wonder why Wilbur Smith ever gave his permission for this..

Duraid Al Simma (Tony Musante) and his wife Royan (Karina Lombard) are searching for the tomb of pharaoh Mamosis (Edmund Purdom). The villain Schiller (Roy Scheider) hears about it and steals their information, hoping to become the famous discoverer of the tomb himself, not to mention the great treasure supposed to be hidden there. Duraid is killed, but with the help of the adventurer Nick Harper (Jeff Fahey), his widow Royan keeps the chase for the tomb going.

This present day storyline is sharing the running time in equal parts with the events in Egypt thousands of years ago, where we learn how Mamosis wants to marry Lostris (Katrina Gibson) although she is in love with the warrior leader Tanis (Philip Rhys). A clever slave named Taita (Art Malik) helps his mistress to escape from the pharaoh while planning the tomb that our modern day heroes will search for. The link between the two storylines is the boy Hapi (Jeffrey Licon) who is the illegitimate son of Lostris, but adopted in our time by Royan due to some mystic snake god's basket travel arrangement (don't ask me how that worked).

Anyway, it a story that fills 250 minutes without too much boredom. The second of the three episodes seems to stretch the story a bit, when the heroes get captured and escape, just to be captured again and escape again. But by the third episode, when the race gets to its climax and deadly traps await the explorers, everything is fine again. This is not a masterpiece of its genre, though. There are some awful early CGI effects (the snake not really squeezing its victim's neck, the Windows 98 waterfall), some bad acting (the blonde assistant of Schiller is completely useless), some clichèd story bits and so on. But all in all, it's ok for TV entertainment and I rated it with an average 5 of 10.

If you are a real Wilbur Smith fan, The Seventh Scroll TV mini series will probably be very hard to watch till the end. At least, for me it was. The script is way too simple; a lot of times the dialogs do not fit the character speaking, especially hapi's dialog. Besides that, the acting is unrealistic. For example, the "bad guys" at the beginning of the film look more like a caricatures then criminals. The only actor giving away some form of performance it the one playing Taita. He is probably also the one with a script closest to the text from the books.

If only a real movie director would have the courage to take on of Wilbur Smiths series and make it into one or more descent movies...

This one looks great! Great costumes, great photography, especially the Ancient Egypt shots are great. But that's it... The actors are really bad... The kid is maybe the worst. The criminals in the opening scenes with the car are from Police Academy or a Bud Spencer movie or something. They look like they don't fit this story at all. Or is it a comedy? And even if it was it is not a good one!

Roy Schneider (Blue Thunder!) is the only one here who can act and that tells everything. I bought the DVD without knowing what I would get, it just looked great on the cover. But this is not worth the money.