I don't understand why this movie has such a low rating on IMDb. It has a stellar cast (with a bit of an annoying bait and switch), it has an interesting story, characters that are actually developed and it is a UK coproduction, so you know it is better than a normal US movie from the start.The film starts with an Egyptian dig (how else) where the likes of Christopher Lee are excavating the mysterious burial place of Talos, the cursed Greek who came to Egypt and learned forbidden magic. Then Lee dies. Several years later, his niece comes to check the dig out, accompanied by the likes of Gerard Butler and Sean Pertwee. Butler dies immediately and Pertwee continues to appear randomly as a slightly insane person. This is annoying if you started to watch the movie because of the cast, but I didn't so it didn't bother me.Present time, stuff happens and two detectives, played by none others than Jason Scott Lee and Jack Davenport, need to investigate. Add to this the two British hotties Louise Lombard and Lysette Anthony and the movie is interesting on that alone.The film lasts for almost two hours, which is a bit too long for the level of tension that the movie manages to maintain, but in no way is it a bad story. While the reasoning of the Talos mummy are not revealed until the end and seem stupid, they become believable at the end with the extra information.Bottom line: a TV movie that appeared a year before The Mummy. If you take the special effects (which were not bad, but certainly were cheap in Talos) out of the equation, the only possible reason why The Mummy would be better is Arnold Vosloo and a slightly more fleshed out (pardon the pun) character for the mummy. While not really a horror film, it is a good paranormal thriller, even with the silly twist at the end.

I'm agreeing with at least one reviewer who liked the small prologue with Christopher Lee who was an archaeologist who entered a cursed tomb on a dig. But after that prologue and after Lee's character dies off and the film flash forwards thirty years the rest of it is an awful let down.Jason Scott Lee plays an American detective over in London where the mummy has gotten loose and he's trying to resurrect himself. Back when he was a living human being he was a Greek exile in the Pharoah's court who dabbled in black arts. He got killed and cursed at the same time and archaeologist Sean Pertwee's got a psychic pipeline to him.What should be suspenseful gets downright laughable. Tale Of The Mummy has some elements of the classic Boris Karloff film, The Mummy, but it ain't a patch on the original.

This movie was a waste of the 88 minutes that it lasted. It was full of poor acting, poor special effects, and a plot that could potentially have been good, but was not delivered well. So, this movie was not good, but could have been good with the right cast and director. Unfortunately, much of the movie was not believable as a result of the way that things were portrayed by special effects, etc. Also, the tagline states that "The curse is legend. The terror is real." There was a curse that was legend (and in my opinion, should have stayed a legend), but there was no terror. This movie did not really make much sense, mainly because their was not much explanation of what was going on (especially at the end). Overall, I would give this movie a 2 out of 10.

Let's compare this movie to The Mummy, which was released a year after this one (why wouldn't we compare? everybody does). Making a mummy movie has a downside. You have to make a story in which a mummy is released or revived, and that mummy probably wants either to take over or destroy the world. This is the same in all mummy movies, so the director has something to make up, so that his movie won't be considered as 'just another mummy movie'. First: the rest of the story, which was (for me) in both The Mummy and Talos the Mummy (or 'Tale of the Mummy', as it is also often called) quite good, though The Mummy has more adventure and comedy, while Talos was more thriller. Second is the acting, which was a bit better in The Mummy (I liked Brendan Fraser and Arnold Vosloo the most in this one). Light is... different in both, because Talos is thriller-like and The Mummy adventure, but both have the light done as it should be in their genre. Music was wonderful in The Mummy, but maybe this is also because of the different genre. The, the special effects... The Mummy had good, if not great, special effects, with mummies crawling over walls and Vosloo's face in the sand (which I thought was impossible to do and make it look good). Then, in Talos, the special effects could be described best as 'pathetic'. How do they dare to do this? The worst is, I think, at the beginning, when Christopher Lee gets it (another stupidity; They list Christopher as one of the first, but he dies about five minutes after the beginning of the movie), his upper half crawls while you see him from a spot in which you can see his 'wound'... which is a computer generated effect, and when he crawls the wound dos not stay in place but just moves forward too, so at the end of the wound you can see Christopher's clothing disappear and reappear. Why has the studio let them do this, in times when dinosaurs are artificially generated, when complete armies are made by computer? Ever since movies like Star Wars and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Studios should be ashamed of special effects like the ones in Talos The Mummy (except for, off course, things like Beetlejuice, in which special effects are made bad on purpose, but even Beetlejuice had better effects than this). Shame on thee, shame on thee.