Mummy Mondays are still on hold due to social distancing (we should be back on track next week JUST KIDDING MY STATE ANNOUNCED A STAY-AT-HOME-ORDER), so this week I’m talking about The Pyramid, a movie that doesn’t actually have a mummy for the villain. I imagine The Scorpion King franchise is the same way, so it was going to happen at some point. Instead our villain is… Anubis. Like, the actual Egyptian, jackal-headed god of death. Well, that could be cool… TOO BAD IT IS NOT!
A group of archaeologists and filmmakers discover a three-sided pyramid, and entering it they find out that it’s a tomb. No shit. But instead of being the resting place of a pharaoh, it was built to trap the physical form of Anubis. Which raises a couple questions in my mind, like if the Ancient Egyptians were so annoyed with their god that the trapped him, why continue to revere him? The pyramid is supposed to be incredibly old, so there’s an implication that all we know about Anubis was written after he was sealed away. Anyway, the explorers die one by one, and in the end we get a standard “horror movie jump scare ending” suggesting that Anubis has escaped. Whatever.
This movie is a genre I like to call “inconsistent found footage.” In a traditional found footage movie, everything the audience sees has been recorded on some device, generally held by one of the main characters. This movie is mostly found footage, but then you get a scene from the point of view of an emaciated hairless cat. Or at the end when only one person is left alive and we’ve just thrown the idea of “found footage” out the window. Why even bother, then?
And there’s lots of other stupid stuff in this. The Freemasons make a cameo with a corpse, because why not. The pyramid is infested with hairless Sphynx cats, which as a breed was created by us back in the 1960’s (we also have tomb paintings that show that cats in Ancient Egypt had fur). There’s the suggestion that the cats have survived for thousands of years by eating each other, which makes no sense. And the cats and Anubis also look REAL bad; they’re just horrid lumps of CGI. Anubis gets some close ups near the end of the movie, and… no. Just no.
This movie was, to the best of my knowledge, shown in theaters. People paid movie ticket prices to see it. What a disappointment this must have been.
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