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The spirit of a mummy haunting the Louvre?  Zoinks, Scoob, this sounds a little familiar!

Directed by Jean-Paul Salomé, Belphégor Phantom of the Louvre opens in 1935, giving some quick background as a ship transporting the sarcophagus of an unknown mummy to the Louvre.  The ship is beset by a rash of hallucinations and suicides, which leaves only one survivor.  The mummy is then lost for years in the basement until its discovery in present day.  An x-ray releases the very silly looking mummy spirit to wander the museum in all its corny CGI glory, which also causes a power failure.

We next meet Glenda (Julie Christie), who is a British specialist brought in to study the mummy; she puzzles over its identity because its name has been obliterated on the sarcophagus.  She eventually finds that the mummy was some sort of religious dignitary, but was buried anonymously for reasons unknown.

Lisa (Sophie Marceau) lives across the street from the Louvre, where she looks after her Granny and leads a simple life.  When a power outage brings a repairman named Martin (Frédéric Diefenthal) into her life, she’s intrigued and her Granny invites him to have a glass of wine with them after he finishes his repairs.

Lisa is hit pretty hard when Granny dies shortly afterwards, and more power troubles lead she and Martin into the basement of her building, where they discover a tunnel that inexplicably leads into the basement of the Louvre, where they go exploring.  They are forced to split up to evade the museum guards, and while alone Lisa stumbles across the mummy in the lab and is possessed by its CGI spirit.

Lisa begins to behave strangely at night and the museum finds itself host to a figure gliding about in the very same death mask the mummy was buried in, and the guards who encounter the phantom are haunted by hallucinations of their greatest fears, driving them to apparent suicides or deaths ruled accidents.

Inspector Verlac (Michel Serrault) is brought in, having had some experience with similar occurrences in the 60’s when the mummy was able to possess a guard and pull a similar haunting in the museum.  He sets up shop in a disused storage room of the Louvre, biding his time until the mummy shows itself, and the mummy continues its nocturnal shenanigans, possessing Lisa and using her to gather a handful of trinkets from various displays throughout the museum.

Belphégor Phantom of the Louvre isn’t a bad film, it’s just somewhat silly.  The plot isn’t engaging enough to give the viewer reason to ignore or overlook the laughable CGI (think typical Sci-Fi Channel monsters) or the way the phantom glides about the Louvre, very much like a Scooby-Doo villain.  Sophie Marceau and Julie Christie do the best that they can with what they’re given, but it doesn’t really add up to much.

The Lionsgate DVD release of Belphégor Phantom of the Louvre unfortunately features no extras except for an alternate English audio track if you don’t want to read the subtitled French.

This film is an okay time-waster, but I don’t know that anyone needs to run out and track this down unless you’re a completist fan of one of the leads involved.

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