Tale of the Mummy
Tags: paranormal

Plot synopsis:
In 1948 Egypt, an archeological dig led by Richard Turkel (Christopher Lee) reaches a tomb (of Talos), which is apparently cursed. The hieroglyphics at the entrance warn that all should avoid the place as it has been abandoned by all that is holy. Despite this, they proceed to open the chamber's door only to be blasted with a cloud of dust, which causes them to crumble apart as though they are made of fragile stone. Richard manages to blow the tomb shut, killing himself in the process.
In 1999, Richard's granddaughter Sam Turkel (Louise Lombard) continues where he left off. When they break into the burial roost, they see Talos's sarcophagus suspended from the ceiling. One of the team falls to his death, and another (Brad) (Sean Pertwee) has a seizure while experiencing Talos' past atrocities.
Nine months later, a power cut occurs, during which the container holding Talos's sarcophagus is broken into and a guard is killed. Detective Riley (Jason Scott Lee) warns them the killer will undoubtedly strike again. At a party, a youth is assaulted by Talos in the bathroom and dragged down the toilet. A man is attacked by Talos in a car park while Sam explains the core of Talos' myth to Riley. Talos directed that his body parts be removed by his followers; and they believed he would someday be resurrected to reclaim them, gaining physical perfection and immortality. Talos was exiled from Greece for sorcery and came to Egypt where he fell in love and, in a pagan ceremony, married the pharaoh's daughter Nefrianna.
Neighboring factions of Egypt ordered the Pharaoh to kill Talos, as all who opposed him were struck with disease or tortured into believing his theology. To save Nefrianna from death, the Pharaoh told her about Talos' upcoming execution and she in turn told Talos. When the Pharaoh's army reached Talos' chamber they saw Nefrianna eating Talos' heart. They were all put to death including Nefrianna.
Brad surmises that the murder victims are reincarnations of the pharaoh's followers and that killing Sam (Nefrianna's reincarnation) is the only way to stop Talos, who plans to be reborn when the planets align. Brad further explains that part of Talos' curse is that the only one who knows what's going on will be deemed a madman. A reborn Talos tracks down Sam to her apartment, but she manages to get away; however, Talos captures her after posing as a dog. After further incidents, Talos continues in his quest to destroy the world.

Review: This somewhat unknown mummy movie starts excellent, with a great mysterious touch and some nice special effects.
"Tale of the Mummy" is a better than expected though somewhat problematic entry.**SPOILERS**Discovering a long-lost Egyptian tomb, Samantha Turkel, (Louise Lombard) and her team, Bradley Cortese, (Sean Pertwee) Burke, (Gerald Butler) and Claire Mulrooney, (Lysette Anthony) bring the contents back to the British Museum.
Discovering that it is the work of Prince Talos, (Enzo) claimed to be one of the most ravenous men in Egyptian history, trying to collect the body parts required to resurrect himself, they race to stop him and put an end to his plans.The Good News: this wasn't all that bad and had some good moments to it.
I took a chance on this, based on the cast (Christopher Lee, Honor Blackman, Sean Pertwee, Lysette Anthony, etc.) and because I liked some of the director's previous films (HIGHLANDER, THE SHADOW).
It had some good moments (and, like many mummy movies, the early scenes in Egypt were among the highlights), but overall the film's plot unraveled faster than the mummy's wrappings.
Would like to point out something, however:  Throughout many of the reviewer comments made about the film on IMDB, it is repeatedly stated that writer/director Russell Mulcahy must be an American because of all the mistakes the movie made when it comes to London lifestyles...sorry, folks, but Mulcahy is from Melbourne, Australia..
But if you want to spend 2 hours of your free time with a good special effects, action and sometimes horror you should see "Talos the Mummy".
This is My second comment on the film.Tale of the Mummy is really decent and yet one of the most different of all mummy films.Christopher Lee has a short but very good part in the film.He actually shows a side of himself that is rarely seen on screen.Jason Scott Lee performed well and his relationship with Louise Lombard was good but it didn't go to the distance it could have because of the situation.Sean Pertwee put on a very act in the film.A very troubled but serious character.Shelley Duvall,Michael Lerner,007's Honor Blackman,Jon Polito,and Gerard Butler was in this as well!As for the movie itself it is very interesting from start to finish.The Mummy is very different and I like the way he changed into many forms in the film and when he came into formation at the end it is really scary.The music in the film is excellent.I really don't know what else to say.Tale of the Mummy is a good mummy movie that doesn't disappoint and if you have a chance check it out!.
The incredible thing about this mess is that it actually got released, usually when a company makes a movie this bad they hide it on the shelf for a few years and then melt it down to make ash trays.
About a week ago, I said that I didn't believe that a movie could be "so bad it's good." Then I saw Russell Mulcahy's "Tale of the Mummy." The special effects are terrible, the lead actor is more wooden than a fencepost, and the movie is edited down so much that the storyline struggles to remain coherent.
In fact, it's actually moderately engaging.When I put the DVD in the player, I was expecting a movie that I would regret watching, filled with bad acting and no plot coherency, and so on (I love Ancient Egypt, so I sort of had to see it).
And Christopher Lee is good in the film's top-billed cameo.However, the special effects are hideously bad.
It could be fun watch and laugh at the bad special effects (this could make a great drinking game), but it's also a decently made movie.
this is a pretty good movie,with good performances all around.it's not the most exciting movie,but it is mysterious and suspenseful.i like Loise Lombard(CSI:Vegas)and Jason Scott Lee,the two romantic leads,but i didn't feel much chemistry between them.the special effects were all right,nothing spectacular.but then again,this is a relatively small scale movie.it does have some exciting moments during the last 30 minutes.one thing that i really liked about this movie is that it is unpredictable.it didn't end at all like i thought it would,and i mean that in a good way.i thought the ending was great.all in all,i'd give Tale of the Mummy a 6/10.
I don't understand why this movie has such a low rating on IMDb. It has a stellar cast (with a bit of an annoying bait and switch), it has an interesting story, characters that are actually developed and it is a UK coproduction, so you know it is better than a normal US movie from the start.The film starts with an Egyptian dig (how else) where the likes of Christopher Lee are excavating the mysterious burial place of Talos, the cursed Greek who came to Egypt and learned forbidden magic.
This is annoying if you started to watch the movie because of the cast, but I didn't so it didn't bother me.Present time, stuff happens and two detectives, played by none others than Jason Scott Lee and Jack Davenport, need to investigate.
Add to this the two British hotties Louise Lombard and Lysette Anthony and the movie is interesting on that alone.The film lasts for almost two hours, which is a bit too long for the level of tension that the movie manages to maintain, but in no way is it a bad story.
If you take the special effects (which were not bad, but certainly were cheap in Talos) out of the equation, the only possible reason why The Mummy would be better is Arnold Vosloo and a slightly more fleshed out (pardon the pun) character for the mummy.
Talos the Mummy (or Tale of the Mummy as the video says) was an awesome special-effects horror film that is in fact opposite of Stephen Sommers' excellent Mummy remake because it is a horror not an adventure as the box art claims it is.
Sad story that Russel Mulcahy's best film to date has been tossed on the video shelf half a year too early from its supposed theater release just so Miramax/Dimension can shamefully cash in the success of the big-budgeted smash hit.
The opening is awesome and if you expect the film to get worse - it actually just stays the same throughout - until the unexpected, yet disappointing ending with a last frame that will scare even the strongest of wills like me!
I wasn't expecting much from this film, especially with the title "Talos the Mummy", to be honest I was quite surprised at how enjoyable the first 20mins or so were.
You guys were acting foolishly.I actually found this film to be much better than "The Mummy." While I immensely enjoyed the summer movie, I feel that it was more of an action/adventure than horror.
This movie goes back to its roots: pure horror, and that's what really makes it work.Set in London, the film follows an American detective and an assortment of other characters as they battle Talos, a banished Egyptian sorcerer who whose body was never found in the days of Pharaohs.
Being a movie that includes a mummy and being a horror movie, I naturally found it interesting and immediately decided to give it a chance, without reading the synopsis or taking notice of who starred in it.The movie does start out in an adequate pace, and does establish some characters pretty early on, which was good for the movie."Tale of the Mummy" has an adequate storyline, although parts of it seemed a bit forced.
The storyline is simplistic and very easy to follow, making it feel like writers Keith Williams, John Esposito, Russell Mulcahy and writer/director Russell Mulcahy were followed a generic blueprint of 'how-to-make-a-mummy-movie'.I must admit that I was more than genuinely impressed with the ensemble of cast that had been hired for this movie, because there are some rather good names on the cast list here.
It was a nice surprise to see the likes of Christopher Lee, Gerard Butler, Lysette Anthony, Sean Pertwee, Shelley Duvall, Jon Polito, Jason Scott Lee and Michael Lerner in a movie such as this.The effects in "Tale of the Mummy" were quite good and actually do, to some extend, still hold their ground even today.
The scene where they brought him back from the dead was pretty creepy, there are so scary moments in this flick unlike the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies, tho I generally liked them too.
But after that prologue and after Lee's character dies off and the film flash forwards thirty years the rest of it is an awful let down.Jason Scott Lee plays an American detective over in London where the mummy has gotten loose and he's trying to resurrect himself.
This movie follows the old mummy formula of "archaeologist unearths cursed tomb whose occupant proceeds to emerge to slaughter many horribly".Its largely British cast fails to rise to the major movie performance required and the most brilliant star amongst them, master of the horror genre Christopher Lee, plays too small a role to support them through the action.
That being said, Sean Pertwee and Louise Lombard produce solid performances as psychotic and English rose respectively.My major criticism goes to the lead actor whose Chinese-American accent renders a good half of his character's dialogue inaudible to all but the keenest ears.If credulity is a feature of horror films, then it is stretched by the profusion of firearms - even a newspaper vendor has his own 9mm automatic!Special effects vary from the laughable (parcel tape as "mummy wrappings"?!) to competent but lack the competence of those we see in The Mummy to which Talos has the misfortune to be compared.
It has been well publicized in specialty magazines that Russell Mulcahy had trouble finding a producer for this pet project of his, which would finally show on screen a startling effect that the classic Hammer film THE MUMMY (1959), due to technical limitations, could only show on its poster -- a walking mummy with a light beam going through a hole in his chest.
(Schrader's version of CAT PEOPLE at least justified having its main characters howl and growl, but would a reincarnated mummy behave the same way?) Worse of all is the incoherent script, which caps an elaborate (if unconvincing) buildup of situations, motives and circumstances with an idiotic, cheap-shot "shock" ending that contradicts and denies everything that happened so far.One usually is compelled to root for maverick filmmakers who are willing not to compromise their vision and push their projects over the stubborn narrow-mindedness of conservative producers.
Talos the Mummy is a typical B-movie horror film.
Pretty much everything about it is either wrong (like casting Jason Scott Lee in the main role) or simply bad (abysmal writing).
The list of mistakes goes on and on.Couple this with a terrible plot, a stupid ending and poor quality special effects and you have a recipe for a disaster.The only redeeming quality was laughing at the errors as the occurred.Don't waste your time..
The special effects were terrible, the acting was bad and above all the end was ridiculous: All the good guys died and the mummy survived.
this is one of the worst films that i have had the misfortune to see,apparently the film is only 119 minutes long, I'm sure that i must have seen an extended version because it seemed to last at least 5 hours!it also had some of the more cheesier moments that i have seen in film, which is evidence of a director having the budget to use some cgi but really shouldn't as they don't know how to use it to its full effect and just ends up looking terrible.
Ever since movies like Star Wars and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Studios should be ashamed of special effects like the ones in Talos The Mummy (except for, off course, things like Beetlejuice, in which special effects are made bad on purpose, but even Beetlejuice had better effects than this).
italian dubbing is convincing for some characters, and just at amateur-level for some others, and I don't think that the original version would have been much better.Most of actors surely didn't play their best performance here.The plot is that kind of story in which you always understand before what will happen in the next 5 minutes, except for the ending, which was the best part in my opinion (expcept for the ridiculous 5 last seconds).Effects are rather ridiculous in the first part, then they are good, but the floating toilet paper idea which should represent the mummy, though well realized, is still some toilet paper floating, in the end..Music was just absent during most of the movie, and decent in the end.I've seen the 88 minutes version, but I don't really think that the 120 minutes one would be better: there would be just 34 minutes more to laugh at, given that you want to laugh at an horror movie.Good to see if you are into a "let my girlfriend have some laughs at least" mood.Oh well..
The storyline went on as any normal mummy story should go, but the last 20 mins or so of the movie made no real sense in the whole scheme of things.
Special effects range from fair to below average, but that's not the reason this is a bad movie.
While Talos the Mummy is often portrayed as a horror movie, anyone who watches the movie as this will be sorely disappointed.Instead Talos the Mummy can be seen for the sometimes crude - but often cute - special effects and the okay acting by Sean Pertwee.
The special effects are in general rather poor, and for a large portion of the far-too-long running time we are treating to the spectacle of people being chased and killed by demonic rags that look remarkably like moving toilet paper..
This really was a poor film , full of corny lines , bad acting and dull special effects.
The acting was terrible the special effects appalling and the chemistry between Louise Lombard and Jason Scott Lee was so not there at all.
The movie is pretty boring, they should have shown more violence (actually show what's happening) The story is some archaeologists break a cursed seal of a tomb an they vanish without a trace only leaving a log book telling of the tale of TALOS.
Tale Of the Mummy had the potential of being a great movie, i think being set in modern time was much better than back in time.
Good mummy films are hard to find and this isn't one either.
Starting with script confusion, wooden acting, ending with amazingly poor special FX (very disappointing if you consider that KNB, the guys who made the incredible FX for "From Dusk Till Dawn", even co-produced), in fact some of the worst CGI-effects I've seen for quite a long time.
STAR RATING:*****Unmissable.****Very Good.***Okay.**You Could Go For A Meal Instead.* Avoid At All Costs.Honor Blackman,Michael Lerner,Sean Pertwee,Bill (Arthuuuuuuur)Treacher,Christopher Lee,Louise Lombard......Talos:The Mummy has a whole pile of veteran cum not so veteran stars on screen,but was not enough to stop it getting a straight to video release over here.It boasts an interesting premise:Talos must complete his mission before the colligning of the planets on Thursday night.But this movie is kind of let down by,amongst other things,an uncertain and overall confused pace.The ending,for example,serves to just drag on.And,I mean,come on,the end slimeball monster had me laughing out loud.All that crafty,impressive FX work for.....that.The initial mummy monster was surpassably neat...but that just looked like a man in a suit.Like a tall,middle aged bloke with a deep voice who'd just had a load of stale strawberry whip melded onto him.I enjoyed the stripes grappling Talo's victims.They were eerie and left an eerie sense of mystery with them wherever they went.
The CGI effects used for the bandages aren't bad, but in the end it all seems a bit pointless anyway as the bandages take the form of a proper mummy after all.Things look cheesily promising in the opening scenes, of a tomb excavation in Egypt.
However, things fall totally apart at the end of the movie, when Talos is reincarnated as a being that looks like an alien (but which is still pretty cool, I have to say) and people run around a dark and gloomy factory (déjà vu perhaps?).
Sadly by this time I didn't have a clue as to what was going on, making this one of the most disjointed, confusing endings ever.Imported American lead Jason Scott Lee (more at home as a bad guy in SOLDIER, I feel) seems stiff and unsuited to this type of film, especially in his growing romance with Louise Lombard.
The movie gets off to a good start with a strong prologue featuring the great Christopher Lee, who of course once played one of the most impressive mummies in movie history during the heyday of Hammer Films.
Not only do we have a brief but important turn by Christopher Lee, but there's also Lysette Anthony, Shelly Duvall, Sean Pertwee, Jason Scott Lee, and even Gerard Butler (though Mr. Butler's character meets his demise just a few minutes into the proceedings).Though nothing really breaks with established mummy-movie formula at first, at least the first act of the film lays what appears to be a solid foundation for things to come.
The Tale of the mummy started out to be a good movie and then it had become more Science fiction than egyptian.
The movie was good in a sense it could have been better if the mummy had been an alien or something.
"Talos the Mummy" is slightly better than Sommer's film, but that really isn't saying much.
Christopher Lee died within like 1 minute into the film.
This comment/review may contain information about the film.Well to start with I thought this was the OTHER Mummy movie.