The Cave

As far as monster movies go, this one was pretty decent--creatures with big teeth and sharp claws who possess some kind of physical advantage over their hapless human prey, systematically devour the characters one at a time. Despite hinting at something far more sinister than big scary monsters, The Cave was still the same kind of story with different creatures in a different setting. Nothing surprising here.

This time we have a team of expert cave divers led by Jack (Cole Hauser) and his little brother Tyler (Eddie Cibrian). They have been called to the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, where a wandering team of generic scientists has found a huge cave beneath the ruins of an old church. The team scoffs at drawings on the old church walls of knights getting the crap kicked out of them by ferocious winged devil monsters, and happily descends into the cave. Which then promptly collapses on them. They are then left to find a new path out of the cave and avoid the ferocious winged devil monsters that start appearing. The hot chick among the group decides at this point that the best course of action would be to strip down into a bra and tight shorts, because if she's going to die then she wants to look good doing it.

For some reason, the monsters take their sweet time in attacking the wayward explorers, and the movie builds up several scenes as though someone is about to be ripped to shreds but then fades to black instead. It turns out that the creatures, when we finally do see them, use a form of echolocation to determine which stupid human to attack next. I fear that the filmmakers simply did not use enough characters for the team, as the real action in the movie does not get going until the end when they can afford to start killing people off. It's certainly not surprising who ends up getting eaten either, as certain personality characteristics will apparently always get one killed in these situations. I was disappointed with the action shots as well, as the filmmakers apparently chose to use the cameras as strobe lights rather than capturing extended seconds of film. Instead of watching a fight between a monster and one of the characters, the audience is treated to a jumbled mass of blurry motion.

The movie does add some rather interesting twists to the "get killed off one-by-one" plot but sadly does not choose to make the story more interesting by expanding upon the idea. The first ten minutes of the film, which is set 30 years earlier during the cold war, builds the audience up for some kind of great historical revelation, but when absolutely nothing comes of it all, I wondered what the point was of including it in the first place. Apparently, this is left as an exercise for the viewer.

For a monster movie, The Cave wasn't horrible, and it achieved its purpose in providing a new setting in which people can be chased and eaten. However, it wasn't very clever or as interesting as it obviously had the potential to be, so I can't say that it was unique enough to warrant the $10. If you want to watch monsters chase down a group of people in a cave three miles beneath the surface, then you will not be disappointed with The Cave. You just won't be surprised either.