The Pyramid

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The Pyramid
Starring Ashley Hinshaw, Denis O'Hare, James Buckley, Chista Nicola
Directed by Gregory Levasseur

The Story:
There is unrest in Cairo as a team of archaeologists have uncovered a hidden pyramid deep in the sands, one that predates even the Great Pyramids.  Reporter Sunni (Christa Nicola) and her cameraman Fitzie (James Buckley) are working with father/daughter archaeology team Nora (Ashley Hinshaw) and Miles (Denis O'Hare) to discover what secrets lie inside the pyramid.

After sending in a robot, it mysteriously goes offline, which leads to the crew sneaking inside and investigating what happened.  They soon find themselves lost in the intricate labyrinth, and stalked by small creatures - and one huge one.

The Synopsis:
"The Pyramid" was lambasted as one of the worst films in a long time.  While I won't go that far, I will say it was pretty bad, but not as bad as most people make it out to be.  Maybe because I'm claustrophobic, so any movie where people are crawling through small inclosed spaces freaks me out (like "The Descent" or "The Cave").  On that part they did their job by completely unnerving me.

Other than that, it wasn't very frightening.  The budget was small, and spent most of it on the building itself, which was pretty to look at.  However, since the creatures were all CGI, they should've spent more money on that.  The main baddie (I won't spoil it for you), looked like a reject from the "Scooby Doo" movie.  If it was supposed to be frightening, it didn't do its job, although it was a notch above your average "SyFy" movie, but that's not saying much.

The acting was decent enough, if not repetitive.  A film that's touted as a "found footage" movie features the common dialogue in such - "Turn that camera off!" "You're not filming, are you?"  "Keep rolling."  Such typical cliches were found in droves here, and to top it all off, it wasn't a complete FF movie, because some shots were done in the typical third-person omniscient style, so it takes away from that found footage format and goes to general filming style, then back, and then changes again.  It took away from any sort of realism the film was trying to achieve.

The Summary:
If it has a bigger budget, better stars and a good story, "The Pyramid" could've been a great psychological horror film, but instead it looked like something done by a college senior study class.

The Score: C-    

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