Sphinx (1981)

The Worst Film Ever

Memorable, crazy movie

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

How sad is this?

I've seen the movie more than once and whether on the big screen or TV, Lesley-Anne Down's hair coloring was so red that it took the attention off whatever was happening in a scene. I kind of got that it made her character more visible in crowd scenes, but it was really an annoyance. Don't know whose idea it was to give her hair such a jarring color, but it was so distracting. The romantic storyline with Frank Langella lacked any chemistry between the characters, it could have been stronger. Loved the Egyptian location and the archaeological treasures, tombs, etc. Made me want to visit and explore the Valley of the Kings. Overall it was a disappointment , not as interesting as the Robin Cook novel.

This movie was great.Langella was believable as an Egyptian and Lesley-Anne Down had an uncanny ability to either retain her hairdo under ANY circumstances or change it by slipping on a carpet runner.Sir John Gielgud does not play an Egyptian in the film as suggested earlier.He is a Brit living there for a long time running an antique/souvenir shop.The movie was much better than the book,where Erica Barron only briefly met Achmet Khazam.This film is one of my all time faves and was actually made to cash in on the King Tut exhibit touring the world.The film has an expensive look to it and cost about 17 million dollars to make.It has newbie Egyptologist Erica Barron(Lesley-Anne Down)from Boston traveling to Egypt and getting into deep trouble like most Americans.Cinematography is excellent and while the plot might be thin in places,the film works.Just two years earlier leading man here Frank Langella portrayed Dracula in the 1979 film of the same name with a dicscoesque quality to him.Chiefly you will learn that mummy's arms and hands make excellent torches.I'll give it nine out of ten points for continuity problems.

Erica Baron travels to Egypt to search for the lost treasure of Tutencamin. Once there she finds treachery and secrets are very common as she searches for the treasure. Who can she trust to help her?This is a very dull archaeology movie, made before Indiana Jones made it all very much more lively. However this has a reasonable plot involving several twists and double crosses - some of which you'll see coming and some you won't, though don't get your hopes up, the twists are earth shattering but merely double crosses and the like. However it's delivered with so little life or excitement that I started to get bored and only really noticed the plot whenever a new character came in or something like that. When you think about the story afterwards you realise that the plot was actually quite interesting but that the delivery seemed to suck all life out of it.Another problem is the actors. First of all the two leads are terrible. Lesley-Anne Down is a ridiculous archaeologist! And she is a terrible lead - here all she does is run around in a jump suit with groomed hair screaming and running, running and screaming, finding a statute, running, screaming etc. Also it is very irritating the way that she looks down at Arabs as savages. In fact almost all the Arab characters in this film are portrayed as bad men or savages when compared to the white, angelic Down - the few trustworthy Arabs being played by white or western actors, such as Sir John Gielguld. Frank Langella gives a drab, uninteresting performance as Khazzan. He manages to show almost no emotion and only one facial expression throughout the film - as a mysterious romantic character he totally fails.Overall an interesting story is delivered with all the excitement of a traffic jam and is spoilt by a bad performance by an actress better suited to TV movies, an actor that is almost totally without character and a support cast that are portrayed as savages. Go watch Indiana Jones instead.

Badly written adaptation of a bad novel and a badly directed film that relies on exotic locations and glitzy set decoration, featuring a beautiful "Egyptologist" who has never before been to Egypt, who takes a taxi from the Nile Hilton to the Cairo Museum (next door to each other), and goes into the tomb of Tutankhamun with a Polaroid camera to "do research". (If the public does not understand why this is laughable, they deserve this film). The title "Sphinx" has nothing to do with the plot, which is loosely about the discovery of a lost tomb. Not exactly PC because all the "good" Egyptians are played by Europeans and the "bad" Egyptians are played by Egyptians. In the opening credits the cast names are spelled out in hieroglyphs, which seems to be the extent of the research wasted on this turkey.