Belphégor – Le Fantôme du Louvre (2001)

Belphégor – Le Fantôme du Louvre is a French horror film first released in 2001, directed by Jean-Paul Salomé.  The film stars Sophie Marceau, Michel Serrault, Frédéric Diefenthal, Julie Christie and Jean-François Balmer.  It has also been released under the title: Belphecor: Curse of the Mummy.  Our overall rating for this film is: very poor.


A three thousand year old Egyptian sarcophagus is rediscovered in the vaults of the Louvre museum in Paris.  An eminent English Egyptologist, Glenda Spender, is called in to analyse the ancient relic and the well-preserved mummified remains it contains.  During the examination, a ghostly spirit escapes from the sarcophagus and enters the Louvre’s electrical system, causing a widespread power failure.  Meanwhile, Lisa, a young woman whose grandmother lives in an apartment opposite the Louvre, has entered the musuem to recover her cat.  The ghostly spirit enters her body and she becomes the unwitting host of a deadly force…

Despite its blockbuster budget and impressive cast line-up, Belphégor - Le fantôme du Louvre is nothing more than a pale imitation of the worst kind of special-effects-driven Hollywood fantasy fare.  The film’s biggest deficiency is its risibly bad script which cobbles together some feeble science fiction ideas and the odd reference to Egyptology in a meagre, ham-fisted attempt to entertain a mainstream cinema audience.  The meanest of intelligence would be insulted by the puerile nonsense that masquerades as a plot, in a film that takes itself so seriously.   The story makes no sense whatsoever, virtually every one of the characters in this film is a two-dimensional caricature, and the special effects – ostensibly the film’s main selling point – are over-used and already look pretty dated.  If there’s one category of film that France consistently does really badly, it is this kind of spectacular fantasy blockbuster.  Few, however, go as badly wrong as this one...

© James Travers 2005

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