Sphinx ** (1981, Lesley-Anne Down, Frank Langella, John Gielgud) – So Bad It’s Good Movie 13

Lesley-Anne Down enjoys a huge but ill-starred star role as the resolute archaeologist Erica Baron in the infamous 1981 so-bad-it’s-good movie Sphinx.

Lesley-Anne Down enjoys a huge but ill-starred star role in the infamous 1981 so-bad-it’s-good movie Sphinx as the attractive but resolute archaeologist Erica Baron, who goes out to Egypt to have a holiday and look for a long-lost mummy’s tomb containing a Pharaoh’s riches, though it turns out that she’d perhaps have been better looking for a viable script.

A murderous tomb-raiding gang, led by a creepy Martin Benson as Mohammed, is at work. Unusually for this fine actor, an immobile-faced, starey-eyed Frank Langella gives a most peculiar, unconvincing performance as Akmed Khazzan, the Arab policeman Down falls for. But then it’s not his fault that he is very miscast.

Director Franklin J Schaffner’s ridiculous 1981 adventure-horror yarn, in which everybody and everything seems out to stop the beleaguered spunky heroine, is roughly carved out by screen-writing adapter John Byrum from a novel by Robin Cook, but the acting from a highly capable cast is at best slack and at worst borderline atrocious.

It’s eminently watchable as so-bad-it’s-good-fun hokum, though, thanks to the over-ripe dialogue, lip-smacking performances and ridiculous plotting, which are all good for laughs at its expense. But, on the bright side, there must be counted a few suspenseful moments, the Orion studio’s costly production (it was distributed by Warner Brothers) and cinematographer Ernest Day’s classy camerawork on Cairo’s incredibly picturesque scenery. It was an expensive flop. On a $14million cost, it earned only $2million at the box office.

John Gielgud provides an amusing star cameo, bizarrely cast as an Egyptian antique dealer called Abdu-Hamdi. It can only have been two days’ work, but it is a measure of his class that he is the only actor here who actually gives the thing a lift. So it is very annoying when he suddenly disappears.

It was filmed in Hungary as well as Cairo, although entirely set in the latter. Egypt locations include the Cairo bazaars, Giza, the Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor and Thebes. Interiors were shot in Budapest.

It’s funny how trips to the Land of the Pharaohs are so ill fated! Remember Land of the Pharaohs (1955) with Jack Hawkins and Joan Collins? How cold anyone ever forget?

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© Derek Winnert 2014  So Bad It’s Good Movie 13

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/