M.G.---

I pretty much lived at the Field Museum when I was a kid. I fancied myself a photographer and used to go in there with a tripod and a Kodak Bellows camera and my pockets stuffed with Verichrome Pan film (the kind you could develop with a red lightbulb on in the room. I'd take long time-exposures of those dark dioramas of cave men and stuffed man-killer lions. Then I'd contact print from those big negatives. (Couldn't afford an enlarger. I would've given my left arm for the Epson scanner I have now and Photo Shop. ---------Yeah, I loved the Mummys but they were spooky as hell, as you said. And the mummified "CAT" was the strangest. Little pointed ears and all. And the X-ray room where you could view what was inside a female's wrappings.------------And BUSHMAN the gorilla was there somewhere. As a real little tyke I loved him at Lincoln Park Zoo. Seeing his stuffed body at the museum always seemed wrong somehow. Not quite respectful.

And I think Peter Hyams felt close to the museum too. He did THE RELIC with an affection for the place that allowed him to use lingering shots of several places that'd be well known to anyone who roamed those halls and wooden cases of collected artifacts as a kid.

Then the final scenes, when the creature/god/plant collector had fully mutated from eating the exotic drug plants, and the mayor of Chicago ( a Richard J. Daley type guy) has this huge society dinner in the main hall with the elephants and the T-rex skeletons and the fire creature sets the whole damn place alight and burns up the people in their tuxes and evening gowns-----well, it's so strange and bizarre in an off-the-wall way that it's hard to do justice to inwords. Rent it. I hope you like it.

Art Thieme