mosquitodragon’s review published on Letterboxd:
"Hi."
"You're American aren't you?"
"How did you know?"
"The one word, 'hi'."
Seriously? The word "hi" was foreign to the British as late as 1980??? I'm not sure I believe anything this movie has to tell me, though, because it seems entirely befuddled. What sort of movie is The Awakening trying to be? Although a classy, fairly high-budget production, I can't imagine it wanted to be anything more than a spooky, scary horror movie but not only is it incapable of scaring the most timorous audience imaginable, it also spends so much time being funereally self-important and grandiose that it forgets to make sure anything really happens at all.
OK, an annoying Egyptian official gets flung off a cliff in a rope pulley accident and a woman dies after a quivering, suspended shard of glass eventually falls and stabs her in the neck. But I'm not joking, these are the only nominally exciting things that happen in The Awakening and neither of them are executed well enough to deliver much actual excitement.
Chuck Heston fucks everything up for everybody in his already fucked up family by disturbing a cursed female mummy from her entombment. He literally prises a medallion from her cold, dead hands - which themselves become a recurring visual motif (the hands being the only part of the mummy not wrapped in bandages), which looks kinda cool while also incessantly reminding me of the man's shithouse politics in real life - which never helps one get immersed in a Heston-starring film.
A perfect counterpoint to the joys of low budget psychotronic films which entertain while often being technically appalling. Here is a very professionally assembled film which does everything technically right (including a whole heap of genuine Egyptian locations and artifacts, whose visual showcase here is the best thing about the film) but which is pretty much devoid of any entertainment value - and it's not even a very good domestic drama.
If you want to watch a film adaptation of Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars, watch Hammer's Blood From the Mummy's Tomb instead. It's not peak Hammer but it's packed with about five times more fun than this.