Sands of Oblivion

TV movie about an ancient Egyptian curse brought to the US in the 20's during the filming of DeMille's first version of the 10 Commandments and which is reawakened when DeMille's sets are unearthed in the desert.

One of the worst films I've seen in a long time.

The question is were the filmmakers serious or kidding when they made this film? If this is serious its a laughably bad movie and a great film to pick on for its badness. If its a comedy its less good but funny for all of the wrong reasons.You will laugh long and hard AT this film, probably more than many other Hollywood "comedies".

Over the years I've seen some pretty decent story ideas that the SciFi Channel has used as a basis for original films. They've usually gone to the bad because the money and/or skill needed to make them A quality entertainment just wasn't there.

THE SANDS OF OBLIVION gives them the chance to mess up not a good idea but a potentially awesome one that could have been as exciting as THE MUMMY or RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Unfortunately, the great idea just fizzles out.

The basis of the story is that when Cecil B. DeMille made the original, silent THE TEN COMMANDMENTS the studio bulldozed the elaborate sets in the California desert instead of recycling the lumber and other building materials. It seems that there had been genuine Egyptian artifacts used in the set and something Very Bad had been unleashed.

In the present day people are digging up the old desert location, and Something Bad is once again free to roam the Earth.

The cast is adequate to the job, and the special effects are really pretty decent. But the script and direction are uneven, and the film never finds a consistent tone. It veers into comedy and seems to disregard the numerous people killed by the newly unleashed monster. Near the end there's a dune buggy race that's professionally filmed but seems to have been cut in from another movie.

The original TEN COMMANDMENTS had a segment set in contemporary times (the 1920's) concerning the building of a cathedral with substandard material and the tragedy of putting cost and convenience in too high a position. A similar theme could have been developed with the lumber, which would be very well preserved in a desert climate.

THE SANDS OF OBLIVION is certainly worth watching, but the main thing I kept thinking was what might have been.

In 1923 Cecil B. DeMille filmed "The Ten Commandments". The filming location was Nipomo Dunes on the California coast, San Luis Obispo County. Near Pismo Beach the home of the Pismo clam.

There he buried the film set after making the picture. Some modern-day archaeologists dig it back up only to find that is not all they dug up.

Rats, no flame throwers but at lease White Phosphorus grenades will work just as well. I got a chance to use a couple of those critters during a military practice.

This film has a Hallmark feel to it and does not take too much time to make CGI look real.

With all the negatives it is still fun to pass the time with if you like all the sci-fi quickie movies where evil pops up mostly in desert scenes.

Worse than the rating it has been given. This is a typical SciFi movie nowadays: bad to awful acting, a script that is poorly written, and shoddy direction. From the opening scene where DeMille is burying his set to the end, this movie is terrible. In the beginning scenes this movie has Moses (which was Charlton Heston in the DeMille film), Pharoah (Yul Brynner) and Nefretiri (Anne Baxtor) overlooking a boy burying a box in the sand. The characters that were to represent the three aforementioned icons were awful and had to resemblance to the people they were to "supposedly" be. The fact that this is in the desert away from civilization is hilarious when someone is hurt and they are all yelling for an ambulance. The screenwriter obviously is oblivious to the fact that there are no ambulances in the middle of the desert. I was sorely disappointed that Morena Baccarin decided to do a film of such low quality.

Which is actually one of those "Leper with the most fingers" distinctions.

The plot is kind of straightforward. We discover that an ancient evil was entrapped in an artifact. That artifact was moved to the United States by Cecil B. Demille, who used it in his first version of the Ten Commandments, then inexplicably buried the sets in the middle of the desert.

Flash to the present day, where a married couple of archaeologists played by Firefly veterans Adam Baldwin and Morena Baccarin, uncover the city, with the help of an Iraq War vet and his grandfather. What follows are the typical made for TV kills of ancillary characters, a dune buggy chase and some bad CGI.

Still, I'm recommending this film on the basis of the characterizations by Baldwin and Baccarin.