WEEKEND REVIEW OF THE PYRAMID

year: 2014 rating: *

When the plot unravels like bandages on a mummy, a group of researchers are stuck in THE PYRAMID and all smell something reminiscent of crap, and one of the guys says to another that the last time he smelled something so rank was when “you had beans the other night.” At which point a giant rock falls and kills off one of the two cliché fart joke idiots. So there is a God!

But in this horror/suspense/adventure flick it's probably more like The Devil: for what's loose underground within a mazy labyrinth isn’t human, and there seems to be absolutely no way of getting out.

Our victims include a bickering father and grownup daughter archeologist team and a reluctant camera crew, shooting everything via handheld… yes it’s that kind of movie, again… and these poor trapped souls have zero chemistry with each other. Perhaps it's intentional since the body count aspect of doomed humans hunted by ferocious rat creatures is what everything amounts to anyway. And when the main antagonist is finally revealed, the best and corniest scenes occur simultaneously – after an hour of screaming in the dark, we can, for better or worse, actually see something!

This “monster” climax is also the one thing separating PYRAMID from the more ambiguous AS ABOVE SO BELOW, another shaky BLAIR WITCH style thriller set within endless catacombs that isn't good enough for another movie to be called a “pale imitation"... but if the shoe fits.