The Pyramid (2014)

So a friend regularly buys me a Netflix subscription for my birthdays and Christmas, and I spend a lot of time searching for decent horror films (among other things). My God, there's a lot of mediocre stuff out there. And yes, I know there always was, but today the not-very-good horror movie seems to be undergoing a revival. I suspect this is precisely because online streaming sites demand industrial-scale production of so-so movies with nothing new to say and no great chops in the scripting/acting/directorial areas.

The Pyramid is a good example of the 'meh' school of modern horror. It's not a cheapo thing cobbled together by some students. It's a 20th century Fox production, some money has clearly been thrown at it, and the cast do a decent job. What's more the subject matter - archaeologists locate mysterious pyramid, get trapped inside, stuff happens - is very appealing. I love me a bit of killer mummy, ancient curses, mad reincarnation stuff, Valerie Leon swanning around half-naked...

Where was I? Ah yes, the plot is simple enough. A documentary team are filming a dig in Egypt. A father and daughter team have discovered, courtesy of satellite tech, a huge buried edifice. It's a three-sided pyramid, vastly bigger and older than all those other pyramids in Egypt. But the Arab Spring is really kicking off so the police order the team to pack up and go. Needless to say, they make a last, hasty attempt to go inside and explore a bit...

The first thing wrong with the movie is that it's a bungle found-footage effort. Everybody goes inside wearing head-cam gizmos, but this conceit is overly-familiar and quite boring. Secondly, the shocks and mysteries they discover are also too familiar. They ramp up the curse concept by having this pyramid as the domain of the ultimate menace in Egyptian mythology, but the execution recalls a video game - there is much hiding round corners and peeping at monsters. Some scenes do offer decent jump scares and the overall look of the thing isn't bad. But that's about it.



The Pyramid might have been a much better movie if it had had a little camp humour and general silliness, but I suspect that's not what was required. Instead we have a familiar series of violent deaths and a twist ending that fall flat. And I'm not sure how it relates to the Arab Spring, which is foregrounded in the opening scenes. Somehow it felt cheap and a tad racist to make something so very real and bloody the backdrop to a bit of old tat that doesn't really work as horror, or indeed anything else.