Secreto Oscuro

The ending was horrible. I was like.... what?

Cheesy movie. I stuck with it just to see how it would pan out and was jilted. Dont waste your evening.

My five stars were for the first half of the movie which was building consistent tension and curiosity. I was kinda enjoying it until the SECOND HALF! It was like they had really decent writers who went on strike at the halfway point. Come on, my dog could have come up with a better half than this one! And it was a terrific cast doing the best they could in a very disappointing situation. Awww what MIGHT have been! Such a pity!

"What Lies Below" is a kind of a flick that could end up being a total trash filled with so-bad-it-hurts CGI and nonsense screenplay. You know, like the most of Syfy made-for-TV creature features. But this one doesn't deserve all the rage. Yes, the dialogues are pretty basic and bland but it doesn't kill the creepy vibe going throughout the whole film length. The acting is decent - Ema Horvath is good as an estranged daughter and Mena Suvari finally stars in a horror movie that is not a garbage (although it's still hard to forgive her for "Carrie 2" and "Don't Blink").

The best part of the movie is its visuals and lore. Lovecraft-esque fear of chtonic entities, hypnotic enigmatic lights coming out of nowhere and minimalistic synth soundtrack are making "What Lies Below" a thrilling eye-candy which is pretty much enough for a one-off horror movie. It doesn't reinvent the genre or offers any real plot twist (I mean, we all know John is going to be a bad guy, and Trey Tucker's effective performance convinces us right after we see him) but definitely worth a watch for its atmosphere and its actors that probably did even better that the script could offer them.

Lifetime and SyFy had a baby and named it What Lies Below.

You know what? I can take the cheese, I can take the poorly written characters, I can take the atrocious dialogue, I can take the threadbare plot, and I can even take the uniformly bad acting. Heck, some of my favorite movies of all time are early-80s slashers, and they're not known for being great art. My point is I love low-budget, cheesy movies. I'm here for it.

But you know what I'm not here for? A movie that has NO ending. At least in an 80s slasher, you could almost always count on a balls-to-the-walls, over the top ending that could allow you to partially recoup your time investment. In horror, the third act is where your money is. An audience will forgive a lot if you give them a great ending.

In What Lies Below, they apparently forgot to craft ANY ending at all. I could have taken the barely passable first two acts of this movie if the third act had just let it rip. Go insane, go completely and utterly crazy. Go gross out, go icky-sticky, go bloodbath, go off the deep end, jump the shark. But do SOMETHING! Make some kind of statement. A great, ballsy ending would have made it easier to give the rest of this movie a little bit of a break.

Instead, we get the worst possible ending any film can give: the abrupt "non-ending" with no explanation and no resolution, leaving you wondering why you were stupid enough to dispose of 90 minutes of your life for a director and writers who clearly didn't value your time. Or respect their own.

In conclusion, WLB is a mess. Instead of the crappy parts of this movie--and there are many--leading to at least a fun and crazy ending, the crapy parts end up being all there is. What an insulting train wreck. Extremely unsatisfying! There's good cheese and bad cheese in movies. This is rotten cheese. Pass.