Perfect cast and a good story

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

A great piece of skulduggery and high adventure, set against the authentic and fascinatingly exotic backgrounds of Cairo and Luxor, Sphinx also boasts some equally fabulous interior settings (filmed in Budapest) that make a perfect match. In fact, here's a movie that would seem to have all the vital escapist elements for a smash success, including its basis on a bestseller by an "in" novelist, its interesting cast, its award-winning director (even if he is a little too inclined to over-use close-ups that undermine the conviction of some of the performances), great camera-work, terrific music score, plus $14 million worth of dazzling production values. Yet Sphinx failed to top even the $1 million mark in worldwide rentals. Why did the critics hate it? Why did moviegoers give this flick the flick? Perhaps the heroine, although superbly played by Lesley-Ann Down, was seen as too eager, too liberated for either male or female picturegoer identification? Or perhaps the mass audiences just won't accept a girl – any girl – as an action lead in the cinema? On TV, no problem. People leave their critical faculties dormant if the show is ostensibly free. (Perhaps that's why TV's Wonder Woman chalked up such high ratings?) Maybe the movie's plot was regarded as too facile and contrived? Maybe what the critics said about the characters being both too enigmatic and too one-dimensional hit home (even though audiences don't usually care a damn what critics say – and it didn't stop people from buying and reading the novel)? Perhaps the background was too authentic, the recreation of the real Egypt too meticulous? Or maybe it was simply that by 1981, Egyptian curse pictures had had their day, so that even a superior story like this Sphinx could make no box office headway?

OK, so we should all know by now that any westerner who sticks even a hair strand into an Egyptian tomb is forever cursed. So many movies have dealt with this that another one hardly registers. "Sphinx" consists mostly of Lesley-Anne Down shrieking whenever something unpleasant happens (and with how she was dressed - without a veil - the people in Egypt would have taken her for a prostitute). I couldn't tell whether or not Frank Langella's character was supposed to be Arab or white: he had an Arab name but looked and talked like a Euro-American. And then John Gielgud plays an Egyptian man; was it still acceptable to cast white people as non-white people by this point? For the record, the title statue only appears in one or two scenes.I should say that the movie isn't terrible. I learned some interesting stuff about archeology. But a far cooler movie in this genre is the Charlton Heston movie "The Awakening". This one is the sort of movie that you rent if there's absolutely nothing else to rent. I read that director Franklin J. Schaffner (most famous for "Planet of the Apes", "Patton", "Papillon" and "The Boys from Brazil") ended his career on a down-slide; with this sort of movie, I can see why. Also starring John Rhys-Davies (Sallah in the Indiana Jones movies) and Victoria Tennant (Steve Martin's first wife; she co-starred with him in "All of Me" and "L.A. Story").Not that this is really related, but I wanted to talk about this movie getting released through Warner Bros. When I was little, I always associated WB with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, etc. Had I known then that the studio also released this movie - plus horror movies like "The Exorcist", "The Pack", "The Shining" and "The Nesting" - I probably would have asked something like "Why did Bugs Bunny make a bunch of scary movies?" This movie however, is not scary.

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.

When this movie was released, it spawned one of the all-time great capsule movie reviews: Sphinx Stinks. It does, but in a mesmerizing sort of way. The casting is silly, starting at the top: Frank Langella and Sir John Gielgud as Egyptians? Not enough makeup in Cairo for that, at least not while this film was being made. But it's rather amusing to see them try. The performances run the gamut from mummy-like (sorry, the obvious observation) to over-the-top, with very few stops in between. The Lesley-Anne Down character seems as though she couldn't find Egypt on a map, much less expound upon its archaeological treasures. That's due at least in part to some really bad writing, one of the curses that will be visited upon every viewer of this movie. It's my opinion that movies involving a curse or that draw their basis from a subject that is somewhat esoteric, such as Egyptology, are ripe for silly, overwritten dialogue. It doesn't disappoint, and the convergence proves a double-whammy. The plot has one driving source of dramatic tension: Can this get dumber and less believable? The answer is, usually, YES. The location shots are beautiful, and the set design is generally very good, the only consistent reminders that this wasn't some low-budget production. That and the fact that there are so many well-known faces doing service in such an unintentional laugher. Cheap, no; cheesy, yes.