The Pyramid

Schlocky terror and bogus Egyptology meet cute in The Pyramid, a slight but effective thriller that serves up its scares inside a maze of ancient booby traps. With the help of satellite mapping, renegade archeologist Holden (Denis O'Hare) and his hottie daughter, Nora (Ashley Hinshaw), have discovered the massive titular monument buried deep under the sand near its famous cousins in Giza. Not only is this pyramid underground, it's also weirdly three-sided and marked with foreboding, unreadable hieroglyphs. A camera crew blunders along with the team, who throw science and logic to the desert wind as they tumble down a tiny shaft into the structure's stony bowels. As expected, the would-be grave robbers are picked off in nasty bursts of carnage as they desperately search for a way to escape. Tunnels to nowhere, falling rocks, dark passageways, spike pits, mutant cats, and a half-man/half-jackal Anubis monster provide varying degrees of grisly fright in filmmaker Grégory Levasseur's “found footage” B-movie, which is aimed at gore fans who appreciate the sillier side of gruesome horror. Recommended. (T. Fry)