“It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” so the really good movies are awaiting a release closer to the official holiday and movie fans are forced to open pre-Christmas gifts of coal and sticks. This weekend, we get to see “The Pyramid,” a horror film that pulls out nary a stop to show a movie that is so typical that you will swear you have been trapped in this labyrinth of scary movie clichés before and all you want is to escape the theater as the characters seek an escape of their ill-advised entrance in a pyramid in Egypt.

When the movie begins we are reminded of the “Curse of King Tut.” It is a known fact that everybody who violated his final resting place dies mysteriously and horribly. As anybody has ever actually read a book by a person who does not wear an aluminum hat knows this story is piffle and bunkum invented by newspaper reporters who should have made an honest living writing pulp fiction.

Anyway, in “The Pyramid” a father-daughter team of doltish archeologists – both graduates of the Hollywood Dunderhead University of Claptrap Ignorance – discover a three sided pyramid (pssst – there are no three-sided pyramids) and enter it along with a camera team, ignoring the well know curse of…uh…monsters and Egyptian Ancients.

All of this, I could forgive for the sake of a good soul-rattling, bladder-weakening tale of screen horror but instead we get the usual house of horrors plot wherein everywhere ends up in a basement without a working light bulb.

The true horror in “The Pyramid” might be the dialog. It is like a dull instrument being bashed upon one’s brain beating out all sense of cinematic standards. Denis O’Hare I really like, but he is trapped in “The Pyramid” figuratively and literally. He does a good job but he can’t save this film because it is cursed by mediocrity; King Tut and his band of dead are innocent.

This is a horror film for hardcore horror film connoisseurs and only then to measure against far better examples of the genre. It has a moment or two but it is the same, poorly lit set, with a glimpse of “Boo!” and a hint of “Whatzthat?”

I particularly disliked the use of night-vision to save a few bucks on CGI and thereby making the film fan achieve the desired tension by having to squint in the darkness for so long; squinting while watching Disney’s Dumbo would make one tense and stressed to the point of exhaustion. (A really scary film made in the bright sunlight would be an original masterpiece, indeed!)

So, “The Pyramid” is a patchwork quilt of ersatz scenes from better-made horror films mostly forgotten, but some classic. Some booby traps in the three-sided pyramid (in “The Pyramid”) have a strong resemblance to booby traps in the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” franchise, where comedy and scary mix sublimely. In the case of “The Pyramid”, it is a like serving grape juice and claiming it is Cabernet Sauvignon.

Don’t go into “The Pyramid.” Wait a week, save your money; there will be many glittering presents worthy of you and yours come Christmas.

“The Pyramid” earns one bow tie out of five.