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Very disappointing...

Too much of everything

Good concept, poorly executed.

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

This was in a large batch of DVDs I bought on eBay at a bargain-basement price. Its title was "Curse of the Pharaoh", but under whatever name it might be released, it will always be a real STINKER. Low budget, yes. Lousy acting, yes. Flimsy story, yes. Surprisingly, however, it was not, unlike other stinky-pooh movies, shot is almost total darkness, so kudos to the producers on this point, for sure! I suppose that for someone who is an over-the-top obsessive, crazed lover of anything Egyptian and curse-like, this flick may have some appeal, but anyone who is in the slightest way discerning, will be turned off within the first few minutes, by the appearance of a poor CG effort at a scary monster (a kind of pudgy, flying bear), and the silly pretty, smirking gal with twin big automatic pistols, banging away at it, while another character waves his arms frantically, runs around and yells appropriately. Oh dear, dear me. Laughable, really. What a start! Not really a contender as a film for grown-ups, but a fairly good lesson in how NOT to make a movie. I give it a 2 because it is not shot in darkness, is in focus, and the music is not intrusive.

I ended up watching this Canadian TV movie for the sole reason that I saw that Lochlyn Munro was the lead actor, while he is not really known, I saw him when he was young as part of the cast of the short lived Hawkeye TV series, and I was pinched by curiosity about what he was doing ten years after that. I had no expectations about the quality of the film, and it turned out to be as bad as I was expecting, despite this I kind of enjoyed it. The plot is so simple, a passage to another dimension is opened and this act sets free a sphinx which, being responsible of protecting the passage, goes on a rampage to kill those responsible. The sphinx is not the only things that gets free, there's also an ancient curse that will destroy the human race, our only hope is a group made by a high school history teacher (Munro), his teenage daughter, a femme fatale which is also his ex-girlfriend and the leader of a government branch dealing with the supernatural. To stop the sphinx they will have to solve a number of riddles and collect a series of mystical stones hidden around the world. I don't think no one watching this films thinks they are going to see something worth of remembering, but if someone does the very first scene, when the sphinx goes wild killing a number of people, should be enough to make clear the quality of the film. Bad acting and bad fx, the monster created with computer animation is terribly unrealistic and could be considered as a digital equivalent to the puppets seen in the worst sci-fi B movies. Sum to this that the two main characters are obvious copies of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, that the script is totally predictable and with every possible common place included: a traitor in the group, a very smart girl, a reluctant hero. I could also talk about the unrealistic settings and the absurd presence in every encounter with the monster of a couple of extras added to the group with the sole purpose of giving the sphinx someone to kill.But despite all the bad things told, I must say the film is bad, but not terrible, and it didn't bore me at any moment. If you know what you are up to then you can also have a good time watching it, and I guess that's what the creators of the film had in mind, it is a bad film, but it is entertaining. If you are in a good mood and with the correct company, then you can have fun checking the inconsistencies of the plot, or some laughable stuff like anti-gravity guns; the genius teenager, with the ability to calculate with mathematical precision the exact second in which a ricocheting bullet will stop; or the sphinx transformation into a human, a moment in which it is played by a wrestler that made me remember Tor Johnson, an actor appearing in Ed Wood films.To finish I must say that the way in which the monster is finally stopped does have a little bit of originality. To sum everything up this is a predictable adventure lacking in both economical and artistic resources, but if you don't take it seriously you may enjoy it. Watching a bad film from time to time is good, as I think it helps you put the good stuff in the right perspective. And if you are watching something bad, then its better if its something like this which despite its shortcomings is good fun.

The movies that are made for the SyFy network are typically very bad, and usually a lot worse if they happen to be made by Canadian filmmakers. "Riddles of the Sphinx" is a Canadian production, and it's awful in almost every department you can think of. The story doesn't make much sense, for one thing, with the screenplay depending on the regular action sequences to grab the audience's attention. The direction is awful - there are several sequences where key linking footage is missing, leading to a number of "Huh?" moments. The movie is extremely cheap as well, trying to pass off the British Columbian landscape as - get this - Iraq and later Egypt! The only saving grace of the production is the CGI creature, which doesn't look that bad for what was a pitifully low budget. Were these filmmakers even TRYING to make a decent time waster?

I couldn't take this movie seriously from very early on in the movie. The CGI department, or whomever was giving them instructions, obviously didn't know what a sphinx looks like and decided to go with a strange looking griffin instead. Even I could tell the difference between the two creatures while I was still in grade school.The acting was fairly poor. The make-up department should never be hired by anyone ever again. The bald guy looks like his head was shaved the day they stared filming and make-up never even tried to blend the skin tone.The script was pathetic. I've seen some bad stuff on SciFi and this is one of the worst. The male lead just comes off as corny while the female lead is normally a much better actress. The little girl suffers from the Wesley Crusher syndrome. People don't like this so why do they keep using it as a plot device I will never understand.