Waste of time

Don't Believe the Hype

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

A three thousand year old mummy wreaking havoc in the famous Louvre Museum in Paris was the subject of a popular French TV series for youngsters from the '60s, starring legendary chanteuse Juliette Gréco. Now, young director – who undoubtedly grew up with the show – Jean-Paul Salomé, who would go on to make the equally nostalgic ARSENE LUPIN with Continental matinée idol du jour Romain Duris, has turned this pivotal childhood experience into an expensive and undeniably good-looking multiplex blockbuster. The elaborate CGI alone must have eaten up a considerable chunk of the budget.Erstwhile centerpiece Gréco even does a brief walk-on for those in the know during an atmospheric cemetery scene where she makes fleeting eye contact with replacement Sophie Marceau, a talented thespian best known to US audiences for her purely decorative turn in Mel Gibson's supremely silly BRAVEHEART. Though obviously aimed at family audiences, this fairly old-fashioned adventure yarn will please moms and dads rather than their offspring who have become accustomed to far more gruesome sights than the extremely mild horrors on display here.For the uninitiated, this intentionally naive mix of scares and chuckles should prove something of a disconcerting experience. For example, in spite of its 1935 Egypt prologue, complete with a tomb desecration whose perpetrators wind up swiftly dispatched, the movie draws less inspiration from old Universal or Hammer mummy chillers than from a long line of possession flicks ranging from the modest WITCHBOARD series to the landmark EXORCIST, with Marceau as beleaguered heroine Lisa, unwilling vessel to the embalmed one's vengeful spirit, doing a PG version of Linda Blair's finest hour for the film's grand finale. More importantly for a pervert like myself, she also bares her shapely butt and (right) boob on separate occasions, just so you won't forget this is a French film after all ! Diminutive heart-throb Frédéric Diefenthal, who rose to prominence playing the clumsy policeman hero of the wildly popular TAXI movies with Samy Naceri, also registers strongly as her frequently beaten up romantic foil. Dependable old timer Michel Serrault (forever swishy Alban from the original LA CAGE AUX FOLLES) gets all the best lines as a retired cop turned security expert and even a halfway decent farcical romance with bumbling Egyptologist Julie Christie, the latter handling her French dialog in disarming Laurel & Hardy fashion.Once viewers can get past the fact that this movie's not intended to scare the living daylights out of them – though the image of the diabolical Belphégor in full ceremonial burial dress hovering through the museum corridors has an eerie Jean Rollin poetry to it – they can fully enjoy this handsomely mounted horror comedy for its ingratiating performances, amiably ludicrous set pieces and stunningly shot Paris settings with all tourist traps present and accounted for. A genuinely haunting score by then fledgling composer Bruno Coulais, who of course went on to write the music for the immensely successful LES CHORISTES, provides the icing on the cake.

This was a pretty dull movie, actually. I think the problem with a French horror film, is that the French must be easy to scare or something, because this movie wasn't just that frightening. The special effects with the mummy's ghost looked like they didn't even belong in the film, as though someone put them in during post-production to spice them up, because the actors barely react to them.The plot just kind of meanders, which is the opposite of real storytelling. I guess this was based on a French TV series, where they had to distill it down to a two-hour movie.The plot is that a mummy is brought out of storage in the Louvre, which apparently has such weak security that this girl and her boyfriend can break into it multiple times. (So THAT'S how people keep stealing the Mona Lisa!) The boyfriend and the police officer from the 1960's version of this film get together and try to exorcise the demon.So I'm not sure if this mummy was supposed to be a bad guy or not. He kills two guards during the course of the movie, but he just wants to get to the afterlife.

In opposite to most reviewers, I'm not familiar with the 1965 b/w TV series, but review this movie as a separate piece of art. Admittedly, ‘Belphegor' is not a perfect movie, as there are a couple of logical problems within the story. Nevertheless it's crafted entertainment. The love interest between Lisa (Sophie Marceau, beautiful as ever) and Martin (Frederic Diefenthal), an eccentric old investigator (Michel Serrault), a museum director (J.F. Balmer) who ignores experts as often as he can (I've faced this kind of boss in real life, believe me) and of course a dark phantom on the loose provide 90 minutes of good fun. And if you suffer from arachnophobia like I do, you'll be happy to hear that this is the first movie about archaeologists since ‘Raiders of the Lost (Sp)Ark' that doesn't employ creepy crawling insects for cheap thrills. Instead, it has a few new ideas. I loved the scene where Lisa explains to a bunch of kids what the Egyptian Book of the Dead is about…gets confused because she doesn't know where she got the knowledge from…and then gets angry about one boy who painted the story the wrong way around in his notebook. It's the little human touches that matter. Voted 7/10.

This is a complete disaster !The cock-and-bull story defies any explanation.The cast is wasted to a fault:I hadn't even recognized Julie Christie until the final cast and credits.Michel Serrault overplays as hell and is almost unbearable.Sophie Marceau is beautiful ,the director does not ask her for more.Jean-François Balmer, a very talented actor is unable to do anything with his empty character.One good line in the whole dialogue:the museum attendant to an old lady :"Mona Lisa?I dunno".One magic moment in a 90 minutes film the screenplay of which could have been written by a ten-year-old: in the graveyard,Marceau bumps into Juliette Gréco who strangely smiles at her:Greco was the first heroine of the miniseries in 1965.This made-for-TV work was first-rate and has worn superbly well today:if you get the chance to see it,please do!Its obsolete charm is inestimable.NB:both the movie and the series were remakes of a silent movie by Henri Desfontaines.(1926)