Cheap Thrills on BluRay—Worth it? Maybe

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Staff Writer

What’s with these BluRays showing up for only like $6.99? Is that a misprint? Aren’t BluRays normally $15-$20, if not $30 or $40? And what are some of these titles that budget labels like Anchor Bay are coming out with, anyway? Many of them, it turns out, are horror thrillers originally made for TV. Others made it into a few film festivals but never quite got their hoped-for theatrical releases and went straight to video. Genre pictures can always sell, and some of them aren’t that bad.

I’d heard of “Sands of Oblivion” (2007) but never saw it on the Sci-Fi channel. It came out on BluRay last December and has recently shown up on some store shelves. For only $6.99 it was hard to resist after reading the blurb on the back of the box, explaining how Cecil B. DeMille mysteriously buried the ancient Egypt sets for his silent film of “The Ten Commandments” after the production, and now modern archaeologists trying to dig it up have “unleashed a horror that cannot be stopped.”

The good news is, the part of the movie set in 1923 is a lot of fun. The bad news is, the horror they unleashed is the rest of the movie, which ranges from adequate to mediocre to not very good at all (and I actually like that kind of story). It’s only 94 minutes but seems more like two hours.

The movie begins in ancient Egypt, much like the 1999 “Mummy” remake and the moderately diverting 2005 TV movie “Curse of King Tut’s Tomb,” but here the acting, production values, and plot points really show their TV budget cheesiness. Luckily that part is the shortest section of the film.
The next part jumps to 1923 when Cecil B. DeMille is just finishing his desert footage for “The Ten Commandments.” Dan Castellaneta, better known as the voice of Homer Simpson, makes a great DeMille, looking vaguely like him and capturing his vocal inflections perfectly. He’s running a bit over budget, and oops, somebody gets mysteriously killed one night before they’re done.
We can only wish this sequence had lasted more than a few minutes, because it has the greatest attention to details and feeling for its period. The film might have been far more impressive if this part was closer to half the total length instead of just setting up the intriguing situation before jumping up to the present day, where it immediately shifts to a distinctively TV movie-of-the-week glorified prime-time soap feeling.
In the present we have a Hollywood-attractive archeological team (naturally with the female PhD in charge wearing a crop-top and short-shorts) racing to dig up the set on the California beach before shifting tides (due to an oil company, of course) put that stretch of sand underwater forever.
Meanwhile an Iraq vet and his elderly grandfather are trying to locate an Egyptian-themed time capsule the old man had buried as a child on DeMille’s set. And the egotistic and adulterous soon-to-be-ex-husband of the excavation team leader is a noted Egyptologist who insists on getting involved in the dig when some of the artifacts they unearth appear to be authentic ancient Egyptian rather than Hollywood imitations.

Naturally, something happens that accidentally lets loose a murderous ancient spirit that starts killing off people until they can no longer pass it off as tragic coincidence. And then it devolves into even more routine and painfully slow formula horror thriller mode through the inevitable end. At least there’s an innovatively interesting CGI fight scene near the end, where the paintings come off the wall (as flat, paperdoll-like people) to fight the hero.

The script sets up some nice premises and periodically attempts to flesh out characters beyond the usual flat caricatures, and works in a few fun old-movie references, but the directing is so pedestrian that we’re just waiting for the next thing to happen.

The acting overall (Castellaneta and a few others in the 1923 segment excepted) is not even up to most TV movies or soap operas, and looks more like something from a no-budget indie film (and I ought to know!). Morena Baccarin is passable most of the time as the too-beautiful archaeologist, but Adam Baldwin is simply awful as her husband, and Victor Webster as the Iraq vet looks like he wishes he were in a better film most of the time. Even poor George Kennedy looks like he’s walking through his part as the grandfather like it was a favor for somebody he wasn’t too thrilled to be doing.

The Starz/Anchor Bay BluRay transfer looks and sounds pretty good, although not especially outstanding and the audio is only a compressed Dolby Digital track. The disc itself is an even lower-budget affair than the film, as there are absolutely no bonus features at all, not even a menu! The movie simply starts playing as soon as it loads into your player, and then repeats from the beginning as soon as it’s done. There are chapter stops, at least, but they’re all at arbitrary spots exactly 10 minutes apart.

Horror fans will likely be underwhelmed by film’s few gory parts and almost non-existent suspense. For a film buff or Egyptophile, the movie is still probably worth buying on BluRay at only $7 but not much more.

Substantially better made-for-TV fare in the supernatural Egyptian genre on ultra-bargain BluRay is the silly, way overlong, but far more entertaining and better-acted B-grade adventure-fantasy, “The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb.” And a bit more fun in the old movie and old movie theatre horror genre is the okay low-budget feature “Midnight Movie” (2008), sometimes packaged with the even more fun movie production-themed horror comedy “Killer Movie” (2008).

Next week I’ll review the BluRay of the ill-fated film “Deadline,” one of the last starring ill-fated Brittany Murphy. SANDS OF OBLIVION on BluRay: Movie: C / Video: A- / Audio: A- / Extras: F

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