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SYNOPSIS:
Teens on a museum field trip accidentally awaken the soul of ISIS, an ancient Egyptian sorceress seeking to resurrect her dead lover.
REVIEW:
Director: Lisa Palenica
Writers: Ted Chalmers, Annie T. Conlon, Lisa Palenica
Stars: Priya Rai, James Bartholet, Michael Alvarez, Lisa Palenica
Isis Rising: Curse of The Lady Mummy is an E-grade horror staring Priya Rai, a hardcore P*rn actress, as the titular character. Basic plot (not always a bad thing). Basic Story. Basic Acting. Basic Effects. Isis Rising is a very, VERY low budget attempt that basically hits the mark of mediocrity. Hell, there isn’t even a mummy in this bloody film!
Isis and her husband, Osiris were killed in ancient Egypt, and now in the present, Isis’ soul is accidentally awakened when a group of teens on a field trip smoke some ancient mystical weed. Isis goes on a killing spree and uses dismembered body parts to create a vessel for her lover’s soul to be resurrected into so they can rule the earth together.
Considering Priya gets top billing, she is hardly in the film. Probably a total of less than 10 minutes I’d say. A good thing as her acting is not that great. In fact, the rest of the cast are pretty sub-par also. Not painful to watch, but there is definite room for improvement for all cast members.
The score had the usual amateur issues of sudden fades to end it or ill-fitting music. It even had the ol’ bang on the piano keys sound! In one scene the dialog was amped up so much that most of it was background noise. When the characters stopped speaking, it all went quiet. Fortunately this only occurred once. For the most part, the dialog was clear though, but jeepers the score was crap.
CGI, SFX and props were laughably bad, and can be expected considering the tiny budget, but still, minimal effort was put in here. I’ve seen student short films with better props. I happily ignored the shoddy green screen at the start, or the shittily drawn brick walls that had misaligned lines between each drawn board, but for the dismembered body parts it looks like mannequin bits were used. The “book of the undead”, which was meant to be from ancient Egypt, was basically a bound encyclopaedia. More effort—scratch that, EFFORT should have been put in here… Maybe if they spent less money painting Priya’s clothes on her titties at the start, they could have afforded actual props…
The director chose to put a voice “enhancer” on Isis’ dialog to supposedly make her sound more malevolent, but instead it made it ridiculously hard to understand and very non-threatening. Imagine Bane from the Dark Knight had sex with Alvin from the chipmunks and their bastard child was then raped by the Lawn Mower Man, their offspring is what Isis sounded like in the film. It was just too “enhanced”… Though still, she is not as bad as what Bane sounds like, that shit was hilariously bad…
Those expecting copious amounts of nudity and sex due to the fact that a p*rn actress is involved will be disappointed. There is none of that, bar two very tame sex and hand-job scenes. I applaud the film for this, to be honest.
Even though Isis Rising had all these issues there was some entertainment to be had. There were little bits of dialog goodness sprinkled throughout and it was obviously made with passion and a light-hearted frame of mind, something you can never really object to. I applaud the writer/director Lisa for making her dreams come true, but I’m hoping this is a stepping stone for her to eventually write/direct much better films with far less plot conveniences and holes, and maybe an actual mummy…
1 out of 5 hieroglyphics