In ancient Egypt, the narrator of this film tells us, the gods lived among humanity and ruled over it. Larger and stronger than us, the gods bled gold and were possessed of great powers. For many years, under the rule of Osiris, it was a golden age for man and god alike.
But then the day came for Osiris to hand over power to his son Horus, only for his brother Set to seize the throne. Osiris was killed, Horus blinded, and a dark age of war and slavery descended over the land.
At the time, our narrator was a street thief with a girlfriend whom he loved very much, and at her urging he attempts to steal Horus's eyes back from Set, unintentionally precipitating a sprawling quest that travels all over this world, the heavens, and the land of the dead.
My hypothesis is that someone responsible for this film loved Ray Harryhausen's Clash of the Titans, because oh my does it remind me of that film: we're got a pretty main cast that simply doesn't have the chops to make the purple prose of the film actually work, not just one but two very attractive women whose only real role is to motivate the menfolk, a plethora of extravagant monsters and action scenes that the film never really has time to set up or pay off on properly, and oh yes, we have massive stunt casting on the gods, presumably in an attempt to make the film seem more high brow than it actually is.
We've also got the whitest bunch of "Egyptians" you're ever likely to see, visual effects that frequently looked far less 'real' than Harryhausen's near 40-year old stop motion creations ever did, and a script that's significantly less convincing than the effects: it's a film that fails on almost ever level as a creative work, really.
Personally, I had a ball with it, because I have something of a soft spot for terrible films that are blithely unaware of how bad they are, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it.
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