The movies that are made for the SyFy network are typically very bad, and usually a lot worse if they happen to be made by Canadian filmmakers. "Riddles of the Sphinx" is a Canadian production, and it's awful in almost every department you can think of. The story doesn't make much sense, for one thing, with the screenplay depending on the regular action sequences to grab the audience's attention. The direction is awful - there are several sequences where key linking footage is missing, leading to a number of "Huh?" moments. The movie is extremely cheap as well, trying to pass off the British Columbian landscape as - get this - Iraq and later Egypt! The only saving grace of the production is the CGI creature, which doesn't look that bad for what was a pitifully low budget. Were these filmmakers even TRYING to make a decent time waster?

Watching Riddles of the Sphinx with little else to do, I was anticipating little and got almost nothing to write home about. Dino Meyer is a sexy and decently charismatic lead. However when it comes to redeeming qualities that's where Riddles of the Sphinx ends. The sets look minimal and nothing to done to make them interesting, and the costumes were reminiscent of the actors having had a fantasy-adventure movie fancy-dress party(or even about to have one). The editing is choppy and the effects particularly with the monster of the title are hopelessly cheap in quality. The script is aimless and filled with unfunny lines that were no doubt meant to be witty, and the story is structurally thin, unoriginal(if it was trying to pay homage to Indiana Jones it took the homage to extreme levels that it feels like a rip-off instead) and has no excitement whatsoever. The characters are badly-written clichés(SyFy clichés in alternative to genre clichés) with none of them likable or developed enough. I was especially irritated by the girl who seems to be cleverest of the bunch, I've seen that plot-device before and something about it always annoys me. The rest of the acting apart from Meyer suffers from the writing and characters, Lochlyn Munro is an especially unconvincing hero. Overall, with the exception of Meyer Riddles of the Sphinx just didn't engage. 2/10 Bethany Cox

Is there any way you could just FIRE your writers, directors and casting director? They need to be told they don't have any business being in this business. The actors didn't even seem convincing, so either this is because they are just that bad OR the director doesn't know how to help anything. The beast didn't look good in the least bit either. I really don't understand the continual monies filling the coffers to waste film on these "productions." There are better stories, better heroes and better music.Terrible drudge. Waste of time is what my 13 yr old boy commented to me about this "movie" I am using that term loosely here. Someone needs to seriously get someone new to head up the programming for SciFi, someone with the ability to tell someone no when they hear a bad idea. I've seen B-rated movies that are better than this, B-rated movies that SciFi channel PLAYS on it's channel. Why don't they take some pointers even from those movies and you know... strive for that?

No surprise - about what you would expect from a third rate network. The budget was probably whatever the limit on the producer's credit card was. All of the typical clichés for a poorly written / directed / acted project that looks like it was done by a bunch of film students over a weekend in Vancouver. (Yeah, we noticed that Egypt, Greece, and Iraq all look a lot like British Columbia in the fall, cough, cough)The only real surprise is that someone with the talent of Dina Meyer would agree to participate in this kind of garbage. Yeah she looked great, but come on, put any physically fit 40 year old actress in an outfit inspired by Laura Croft and they will too. Need the work that badly eh - what a shame.A big waste of time and pretty sad considering how many other potentially decent projects didn't get bankrolled so this waste of film could.