The Curse of King Tut's Tomb, Part 1

The centerpiece of the action here is the Emerald Tablet, which is that crappy plastic thing you saw Tut breaking over his knee back in the introduction. Legend has it that the Emerald Tablet can open the portal to Egyptian Hell and summon a plague of demons over the land. The Hellfire Council want the tablet because plunging all of civilization into chaos is, apparently, a great idea after you've already achieved total world domination. Meanwhile, Danny Do-Good is also trying to assemble the Tablet, because if the right people go down there and ask Egypt Satan nicely, maybe he'll go around building orphanages and puppy hospitals instead of raining sulfur meteors and eating peoples' souls. Finally, a movie with realistic, nuanced character motivations.

We shouldn't forget in all the excitement that this is a Hallmark Channel joint, which means that on top of all the generic insanity there's also a bizarre, uncomfortable vein of "hooray for sobriety" undertones running throughout the movie, which sure does make sequences like this a bit awkward:

Jesus, even the plot holes have fucking plot holes.

Let's just break this down for a moment here while you non-alcoholically drink that in: master hustler Danny Fremont needs to score an authentic map to Tutsville (and assumably some money after getting shit-canned from his job teaching birds and squiggles at Loony Toon U Cairo). Naturally he decides that the best way to accomplish this is by cheating at high stakes poker. More specifically, by pretending to drink whiskey while pouring his shots out under the table at high stakes poker, presumably so he can clean up on all the stupid drunks at the table...except then he gets taken to school and loses all of his money to them for real anyway.

Just when you think it can't get any stupider, his plan B is 'badly pretending to hurl while obviously stealing the priceless map from the table in front of a half dozen guys with guns', and to top it all off, for some insane reason, nobody seems to care about any of this until the spittoon full of brown liquid gets knocked over, revealing...wait, what, exactly? That he's not actually shitfaced? That he totally fleeced them by losing all his money while pretending to be drunk but not actually being drunk? Get him, boys! We'd love to hear the writer and director try to explain the thought process running through all this. We'd also love to hear them explain why they thought the table full of guys playing a game based on carefully watching your opponents' every move wouldn't be curious about the doofus drinking with his knees all day, but alas, instead, we get to watch 2 Humps 2 Furious:

Even for a camel chase that was pretty boring. Again, probably because it's the Hallmark Channel, and so instead of exploding Nazis getting decapitated by elaborate booby traps we have some nice wholesome nothing happening for the whole family to not enjoy!

The rest of the first 90 minutes of this movie are carefully timed so that once you wake up from the coma induced by the slow-motion camel chase, you'll see our teetotaling hero finally discovering King Tut's tomb. If you're a particularly heavy sleeper, you might miss the fact that the poker-game map was a fake and he took his real directions from a map burned into a crazy homeless man's chest, but never mind that, he found the legendary tomb and he didn't even need a drink. Well, he does kind of lead Sinclair directly to the missing relic he needs to become an unstoppable god of death by all but delivering it giftwrapped to his doorstep, but hey, at least he won't have whiskey dick during the end of the world! But that's a story for next time:

Next week: The worst parkour in movie history, Casper van Dien runs away from more things, and what happens when you die in Egyptian hell!

– Garrett "Hydrogen" Neil and Sean "Trillaphon" Neil (@trillaphon)