OK, so we should all know by now that any westerner who sticks even a hair strand into an Egyptian tomb is forever cursed. So many movies have dealt with this that another one hardly registers. "Sphinx" consists mostly of Lesley-Anne Down shrieking whenever something unpleasant happens (and with how she was dressed - without a veil - the people in Egypt would have taken her for a prostitute). I couldn't tell whether or not Frank Langella's character was supposed to be Arab or white: he had an Arab name but looked and talked like a Euro-American. And then John Gielgud plays an Egyptian man; was it still acceptable to cast white people as non-white people by this point? For the record, the title statue only appears in one or two scenes.
I should say that the movie isn't terrible. I learned some interesting stuff about archeology. But a far cooler movie in this genre is the Charlton Heston movie "The Awakening". This one is the sort of movie that you rent if there's absolutely nothing else to rent. I read that director Franklin J. Schaffner (most famous for "Planet of the Apes", "Patton", "Papillon" and "The Boys from Brazil") ended his career on a down-slide; with this sort of movie, I can see why. Also starring John Rhys-Davies (Sallah in the Indiana Jones movies) and Victoria Tennant (Steve Martin's first wife; she co-starred with him in "All of Me" and "L.A. Story").
Not that this is really related, but I wanted to talk about this movie getting released through Warner Bros. When I was little, I always associated WB with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, etc. Had I known then that the studio also released this movie - plus horror movies like "The Exorcist", "The Pack", "The Shining" and "The Nesting" - I probably would have asked something like "Why did Bugs Bunny make a bunch of scary movies?" This movie however, is not scary.
I should say that the movie isn't terrible. I learned some interesting stuff about archeology. But a far cooler movie in this genre is the Charlton Heston movie "The Awakening". This one is the sort of movie that you rent if there's absolutely nothing else to rent. I read that director Franklin J. Schaffner (most famous for "Planet of the Apes", "Patton", "Papillon" and "The Boys from Brazil") ended his career on a down-slide; with this sort of movie, I can see why. Also starring John Rhys-Davies (Sallah in the Indiana Jones movies) and Victoria Tennant (Steve Martin's first wife; she co-starred with him in "All of Me" and "L.A. Story").
Not that this is really related, but I wanted to talk about this movie getting released through Warner Bros. When I was little, I always associated WB with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, etc. Had I known then that the studio also released this movie - plus horror movies like "The Exorcist", "The Pack", "The Shining" and "The Nesting" - I probably would have asked something like "Why did Bugs Bunny make a bunch of scary movies?" This movie however, is not scary.