First things first, a thank you to my, I guess, existant fanbase, for recently giving me my 1000th page view! Alright! I do hope that you guys are readers and not just stumblers who quickly skim and move on because I put some thought into this shit. Nahh, anyway, I've been wanting to get around to this movie for awhile now. I'd heard a lot of good things about it, so I naturally wanted to check it out.
Well, my first complaint is the beginning. It's real slow. I think it's purpose was to let us get to know the characters before the movie picks up, which is naturally a good thing to do, but it doesn't do it well. The characters are mostly indistinguishable from each other and got them all mixed up anyway. Besides, it's not that important to know who's who, considering it's not a character driven story at all and I only ended up needing to remember two of them. The acting is what you'd expect from this type of movie... meh. It's not great by any means, but it does it's job and is just good enough so that it doesn't detract from the rest of the movie.
The plot is delightfully simple. A group of girls venture into an unexplored cave, get stuck and are attacked by monsters. For what it is, it's definitely more of a thriller than a horror movie (but thriller is just a subgenre of horror anyway). It's set up really well. You get glimpses of the monsters, they find old spelunking equipment and bones. Once the monsters come out, all hell breaks loose and the movie picks up a little. Unfortunately, just about all plot development ceases from there on and it's just about getting out but it's paced very well. It's like the director said, "[We didn't want to] take it up to 11 in the first few minutes and [not be able to] keep it up. We wanted to show all those terrible things in the cave: dark, drowning, claustrophobia. Then, when it couldn't get any worse, make it worse."
This movie is riddled with horror cliches, which, in turn, makes it pretty predictable. It's not like it'd be a feat to guess the ending from the beginning, I did. People venture off alone, there are jump scares, dreams; y'know, all that good stuff.
Another thing, I think the movie is too gory. It's not that I can't handle it or anything, but I think that the violence makes the movie feel a little lopsided. It's just too much for it's own good and it just doesn't feel scary. It would be better if the gore was more conservative and it relied more on suspense. This is a movie that could do really well and be terrifying if it were focused on that but it goes straight for the blood. I guess I shouldn't be surprised considering it was the same guys that made Saw and Hostel.
The cinematography is surprisingly good in this movie. The cave shots are all well done, and look very real. Apparently they were built at Pinewood Studios in London because filming in a cave is naturally, dangerous and time consuming, but you wouldn't know that just by looking at it, like I said, the sets are made very well. They effectively create the dark and claustrophobic atmosphere they were going for.
I really like the way the monsters look in this movie. They crawl around the caves, blind and screaming and look like bizarre goblins. They're quite creepy and they make a hell of a mess when they kill things.
The action in the movie is largely centered around fighting them and getting out and the action sequences are cool and all, but like I said before, I wished they'd gone for more of a suspenseful sort of approach. Maybe if they ran from them more often than they tried to fight them, for instance. Imagine scrambling through the cramped catacombs with those snarling beasts on your heels? That'd be a pulse-pounding sequence.
Well, anyway, for what it is, the movie is pretty good. It's not as good as the internet hype IMHO, but it's still entertaining. Not a very memorable movie by any means.
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