The Awakening

It's sad to find a legendary actor like Charlton Heston working on a tenth rate horror film like this. The story takes its inspiration from a largely forgotten Bram Stoker novel and casts Heston as an obsessive archaeologist searching for the tomb of an evil Egyptian queen. He finds it, but at the very same moment his wife is busy giving birth to a baby daughter. You don't have to be a detective to figure out that the spirit of the long-dead evil queen possesses his daughter. Nor do you have to be particularly bright to guess that as she grows into a teenager, she begins to demonstrate worryingly dangerous behaviour. By the end, daddy Heston (just like Gregory Peck in The Omen) is convinced that his little girl is demonic and attempts to destroy her.

Jack Cardiff tremendous photography provides the film with its sole merit, bringing to life the glorious Egyptian vistas in all their sun drenched beauty. Heston and York act decently, but the material is hardly challenging. The main problem with the film is the dullness of the script and the absence of pace and urgency in the narrative. It's predictable too, which is a shame. Worst of all, it commits the sin that so many horror films commit: it completely fails to push the viewer out of their comfort zone. No questions are posed, no disturbing ideas are explored and no menacing message is used to underpin the film. It's just a bland, boring travelogue that dares to call itself a bloodcurdler.