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THE CAVE (2005)
Director: Bruce Hunt. Hacktors: Cole Hauser, Eddie Cibrian, Piper Perabo. Rating: 
The lowdown: In all honesty, The Cave was always going to come up short, alongside The Descent. Compared to Neil Marshall's classy blood-fest, this PG-13 romp looks more than a little anaemic. Yet the movies share so much in common: both are both teams of explorers venturing underground, only to discover that (a) the entrance has been blocked off; and (b) the complex is inhabited by vicious creatures which have evolved in the subterranean environment. So, exactly how bad is The Cave compared to The Descent? Good points: The creatures have a fairly neat, prehistoric look about them and each seem to have individual traits, whereas The Descent's beasts were fairly uniform, apart from differing in terms of ages. So the monsters themselves aren't too bad (possibly aided by the horribly rapid-fire editing whenever they appear) and there's also an intriguing idea that they can infect humans, transforming them into one of their own kind... Bad points: ... which is all but wasted. Not we'd care much if the entire team became monsters in the bat of an eyelid, as it's difficult to warm to any of them. These characters, if I can call them that, have been sketched out on the back of beer-mats. Or possibly not sketched at all, as they really don't come across. At all. It's great to see Cole Hauser, son of that effective '80s psycho Wings, and he's not a bad actor, but like everyone else he's saddled with a terrible script, full of cliches and very little to maintain the interest. The sets like look exactly like film sets and seem to link together in a weirdly illogical fashion. Overall: Despite The Cave's half-hearted attempts to be a big, exciting adventure flick (and in different hands it could have been a nicely old-fashioned one), it winds up being a gutless, largely bloodless, boring waste of 97 minutes. Release Date: August 26, 2005. [Home] © Copyright Slasherama 2002-present |