h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hey, you gets what you pays for. No pretentions about great cinema, if you want that, go see American Beauty - it has all the pretentions of great cinema you can handle in one sitting.

Let's face it, it takes a lot to scare a modern audience what with shower stabbings, chestburstings and cannibalistic psychiatrics - who in this day and age is going to be scared by a slow-moving mound of gauze bandage? So if you can't go for frights, you have to go for wows.

Bonus points have to be awarded for having old Bernard Fox ( the old pilot) on board, erstwhile of Hogan's Heroes and MASH, and any other American show where they wanted a token Brit.

This one gets the thumbs up from me in that mixed audience from 7yrs to 21 yrs[ second time round] enjoyed this one. I thought the idea of things up under the skin eating you from the inside out was pretty yuckky.Hadn't enjoyed a movie so much since Indiana Jones - the first one. It gets so hard to find a movie that the whole family can enjoy so definitely recommend this one.Some good humour,and nice byplay between leads all wrapped up in a derring-do, boys own stuff.

True, its a good fun movie. Made to be, works as and cannot be faulted in that respect.

As a piece of escapist fun, The Mummy is great, but that's all it is. There are so many historical and geographical inaccuracies in it that I can't take it seriously - not even as a 'horror' film. We have it on video and watched it soon after we got back from a holiday in Egypt. It is now my most 'nitpicked' film - over 25 'faults' in one film.

(If you don't know about 'nitpicking', visit http://www.nitpickers.com)

Can you give me a few of them? Personaly i dont like to nitpick much, especially about a film like The Mummy (Its not important enough to me to worry about). But I would be interested in hearing a few of the ones that really got your goat....

O.K., here goes.

The Pharoah at the start of the film (Seti) is wearing the wrong crown. He's wearing the crown of Lower Egypt. Thebes is in Upper Egypt, so he should be wearing that crown or the double crown (Upper and Lower Egypt).

The Ancient Egyptians didn't use body make-up.

Pharoahs didn't have mistresses. They had as many wives and concubines as they wanted. 'Mistress' suggests an illicit relationship.

Thebes wasn't called Thebes until about 300BC. The Pharoahs around Seti's time called it Waset.

Thebes is shown with pyramids and a Sphinx. These are miles away at Giza. There aren't even any pyramids near Thebes (now Luxor).

Thebes is all wrong. The temples don't look anything like they did in those days, the avenues of ram-headed sphinxes are missing... The list is endless.

When they show Giza in the 1920s, they show the Pyramids just yards away from the Nile and on the same level as the Nile. Giza isn't on the Nile and the Pyramids are on a plateau.

Later on they show more pyramids. There are pyramids along the Nile, but not as close as they are shown. There would be too much danger of flood damage.

There's at least one statue (probably more) of Anubis with his right foot forward. If you look at Egyptian statues, be they of pharoahs or of gods, they all have the *left* foot forward. Nobody knows why.

These are just some of the nitpicks I've come up with. I agree 'The Mummy' isn't an important film, i.e., not it's not meant to be a serious historical film, but there are just so many things wrong with it. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy the film (we wouldn't have it on video if I didn't), but I just see it as escapism. I can't take it seriously.

It's great, there's a teacher at my high school that shows The Mummy in his Challenge Ancient History course just to show how incredibly historically inaccurate the thing is.

If you like laughing at the mummy go to

www.cityofthedead.freewebspace.com

and visit the spoof page

Its hilarious!