The Awakening starts in Egypt 'Eighteen Years Ago' where an archaeologist named Matthew Corbeck (Charlton Heston) & his assistant Jane Turner (Susannah York) are on the verge of making the biggest archaeological find since the discovery of Tutankhamen. Corbeck is obsessed with locating the ancient 3,800 year old tomb of the evil Egyptian Queen Kara. Corbeck is so obsessed that he neglects his heavily pregnant wife Anne (Jill Townsend) who is in Egypt with him. Corbeck eventually locates Queen Kara's tomb & ventures inside, as he is about to open Kara's sarcophagus Anne gives birth to a stillborn baby girl. As Corbeck opens the lid to reveal the mummified Queen Kara his daughter starts to breathe almost magically coming back to life. It's now 'The Present' & Queen Kara's sarcophagus is housed in a museum in Cairo, Corbeck is now married to Jane & teaches in England while his ex wife Anne & his daughter Margaret (Stephanie Zimbalist) both live in New York. News reaches Corbeck that Queen Kara's remains may be deteriorating due to a fungus & that it needs to to treated. Margaret, who is just one week away from her eighteenth birthday, suddenly decides she has to see her Father & flies to England at the same time the mummified remains of Queen Kara arrive from Cairo. However death seems to follow Kara around, almost as if a supernatural force is guiding her to a predetermined destiny & anyone who stands in the way can expect to experience a fatal accident. Margaret starts to change, she appears to become possessed by the evil Queen Kara who wants to live again...

Directed by Mike Newell I actually quite liked The Awakening despite the stick it seems to get. The script by Chris Bryant, Clive Exton & Allan Scott based on the Bram Stoker novel 'The Jewel of Seven Stars' is intricate & you need to have patience to get the most out of it. If you want CGI mummy's & explosions every couple of minutes then The Awakening is definitely not the film for you, stick with Stephen Sommers The Mummy (1999) & it's sequel The Mummy Returns (2001) both of which I throughly like by the way. This is basically the same film as Hammer's Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971) which I thought was crap & I much prefer this take on Stoker's novel. The biggest problem I had with The Awakening, & the one most of it's detractor's seem to have, is that when the film returns to 'The Present' it is just too slow, it desperately either needed a couple more killings to liven things up a bit or to be edited down by five or ten minutes to quicken the pace. There is no mummy walking around in bandages so don't expect any of that sort of thing, the core storyline of The Awakening relies on a supernatural angle & possession rather than a guy in bandages. I think The Awakening is a very handsome film with real Egyptian location filming, in fact it's probably the only mummy film ever to be actually shot in Egypt! The cinematography by Oscar winner Jack Cardiff is as accomplished as you would expect. The sets especially Queen Kara's tomb, the Egyptian artifacts & general production design credited to Micheal Stringer are excellent throughout. I thought director Newell managed to create some good scenes & have an overall foreboding atmosphere for most of the film. There isn't much in the way of blood or gore but there is a really cool scene when a slither of glass falls from a broken window & impales someones throat, ouch! The acting is pretty good, well I thought so anyway. I liked The Awakening despite the fact everyone else seem to hate it, sure it's slow but I found it quite involving as well & was a nice change of pace without ever threatening to put me to sleep. I'm not sure I can recommend The Awakening as it would probably put most people into a coma but what the hell, I liked it & that's all that really matters to me.

Obviously influenced by that popular 1976 supernatural horror film, this update of a Brand Stoker novel has beautiful location footage, some really intense moments but not much else in the way of what makes a supernatural film memorable. Slow pacing and weak performances (Charlton Heston, particularly, trying too hard to be commanding) are other weaknesses that contributed to this being a bomb in 1980.

The story surrounds the transition of the soul of an evil Egyptian queen into the newborn child of Heston and wife Jill Townsend. She grows up to be Stephanie Zimbalist, scared of something she doesn't quite understand thanks to blackouts, blaming herself for the separation of her parents and his taking up with his lovely assistant Susannah York.

There are some memorable moments, particularly at the locations of presumed Egyptian pyramids, and several outside. One gruesome death has a man falling off the platform of a pyramid, swinging dangerously and falling further and faster, another inside of pyramid where a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" type trap impales him. Another character falls off a balcony, struggles to move and then is impaled by a chart of glass that they accidentally loosen.

This obviously has more in common with "The Omen" and "The Exorcist" due to its supernatural themes, coming out the year before "Raiders of the Lost Ark" yet nowhere near as compelling. Heston's acting in this is totally forced, seeming like something from 20 years before, and completely out of step with what everybody else is doing. This fails on many levels, yet is worth seeking out for a one time viewing as long as the watcher is completely awake, but not like the demonic queen the plot sums up.

This is a dreary and dull rehash of Bram Stoker's novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars. It had already been made once, unsuccessfully, as Hammer's BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB, but somebody had the bright idea of making it again, in Britain, with Charlton Heston in the lead role. They didn't succeed very well, although the film is just about worthwhile for the authentic Egyptian scenes of sphinxes and desert tombs, which, for sheer visual value alone, blow away the staged sand-boxes that Hammer employed in their various Egyptian escapades.

Things kick off with a suitably atmospheric Egyptian prologue (lasting thirty minutes) which show Heston and his companion/lover York eventually discovering the tomb of Queen Kara they have been searching for. Heston uses a sledgehammer to smash his way into the tomb, while at the same time his wife gives birth to their daughter before promptly leaving for America - without Heston. I do admit that the sound effects guys manage to work up a few chills with the eerie moans and echoes that rise out of Kara's tomb because of the wind, but Newell's direction is static and saps the life out of any potentially exciting events.

Cut to eighteen years later, and Heston's grown-up daughter (Zimbalist) arrives in London to live with her father. He dashes her off to Egypt in a scene which serves no purpose to further the plot - instead, it just seems to be an excuse to show some nice Egyptian locations (again) and the dusty interiors of a tomb. The plot really begins to fall apart at the end, with Heston becoming obsessed and his daughter possessed; some incestuous love between the two is hinted at but never explored - only through a brief kiss. The final occurs in the British Museum (not a bad place for a finale, I do admit) and sees Heston trying to resurrect the Queen - not realising he is doing so, except through his daughter. Horrified, before he can act he is buried under some unexplained falling masonry. Halfway through this scene we see a young male associate of Heston's breaking into his house to find some ancient artifacts missing - we don't see this guy again, which makes the scene totally arbitrary and pointless, and perhaps suggests that footage has been left on the cutting room floor. The ending sees Zimbalist reincarnated as the Queen (well, either that or she's suddenly decided to try some new eye make-up and a new hairstyle), set loose in London.

The acting is pretty wooden, even from the experienced players. Heston is believable as the stuffy Professor, but he can't get over the fact that his character is a cliché and one-dimensional. Zimbalist just doesn't have the presence to be scary as his daughter, while York tries to make the best of her nothing role. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot a young Ian McDiarmid popping up as a psychiatrist before he shot to a kind of fame in RETURN OF THE JEDI (as the Emperor, no less) as well as Miriam Margoyles as a nurse.

This is a dull, action-less film, it has to be said, complete with long scenes of dialogue and standing around. To try and counter-act this, the producers obviously demanded that a string of gory deaths be thrown in periodically, in the style of THE OMEN. These deaths are staged in a silly over-the-top way but they do serve to make things a bit more watchable. One man is hanged via a runaway cable; another is crushed by a truck; another stabbed by a trap and finally, in the film's most painful death, an unfortunate character falls on to his own syringe which embeds in his heart. The film's best death belongs to York, who falls to her death through glass. Except that this doesn't kill her; a swinging piece of glass falls down into her throat and finishes the job. Before this happens, we are subjected to a few moments of intense suspense, sadly the only suspense in the entire film's running time. THE AWAKENING was a flop and is a bad film, yes, but there are some things worth watching for so it's not the worst movie ever - just a below average one.