Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh (1991)

It's not enough that this is a very, very bad movie (as could easily be surmised from the title). What makes this low-budget fiasco even more painful than its hyuk-hyuk sense of humor and terrible acting is that its job has already been done twice over. Bloodsucking Pharaohs is a loose remake of Herschell Gordon Lewis's seminally silly gorefest Blood Feast, and it cops the plot but leaves behind the blissfully rude incompetence (not to mention the trailblazing timing) that makes Lewis's film such a charming endeavor, subsituting instead the kind of pushy, super-broad breed of plasticine incompetence that overwhelmed the B-world in the '80s. Not that remaking Blood Feast is necessarily a bad idea -- in fact, Jackie Kong made possibly the greatest B-movie ever when she used Lewis's template to make the insistently loopy slice of crazy called Blood Diner. Setting the anemic Pharaohs in relief next to those two films only points up how worthless the former is -- it's irritating instead of engaging, a firm example of unpretentiousness gone wrong and curdled into head-splitting idiocy. One twitch of Mal Arnold's eyebrows is more fun than this film in its entirety.

Grade: D-