The Pyramid - The pyramid scheme

Okay, so the ‘Pyramid’ is one of those ‘monster-munching’ films where the cast in generally stalked and eliminated by a – usually pretty unseen due to budget constraints – monster (or pack of them).  Normally they’re basically the same as the last one you’ve seen.  And this one is pretty normal.  Not to say that it’s that bad.  Just nothing new.

For a start it could have been so much worse – it could have been ‘found footage.’ In fact... it nearly was.  There is a ‘documentary element’ to the film where a fair proportion is shot on handheld cameras by one of the characters.  Luckily, this isn’t a major point of the film.  It’s mainly used nearer the beginning and I was on the edge of my seat, praying that I hadn’t accidentally watched a found footage film by mistake.  Luckily, the main part of the film is shot from a third person perspective – thank the cinematic gods.

And it does have other plus points besides being one of the only modern horror B-movies not to stoop to the ‘found footage’ genre.  Its setting is pretty cool, i.e. the fact that a film crew (or is it archaeological crew – I forget – anyway, it doesn’t matter) go under the pyramids (or a new one, possibly – again, does anyone really care?).  It’s about a group of people in a pyramid getting stalked and eliminated by things that you really don’t want to meet under a dark, unexplored pyramid in the middle of the Egyptian desert (if indeed it was even set in Egypt – who cares?).

The two groups of people are both what you’d expect.  The humans we’re supposed to care about are just about passable.  For those of us who have seen (and loved!) the British TV show ‘The Inbetweeners’ will enjoy seeing James Buckley doing something other than chase women and we’ll definitely root for him.  Then you have the monsters.  They’re CGI.  That can work, but mainly it doesn’t.  Here, the atmosphere is pretty dark (literally!) so the lack of light does cover up any visual indiscretions.

As I mentioned, what you have here is a totally ‘normal’ monster munching movie.  It’s nothing terrible, but nothing you’d really remember if you were a fan of the genre.  If you’ve seen the ‘Decent’ then you’ve basically seen the better version of this movie.  Just stick to that.

5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back