Within

My first post at the IMDb has to (unfortunately) be to warn others not to waste their time with The Cavern! There is no story, no character development, no scares, and no good lighting. It doesn't make any sense. If you enjoy bad acting, people running through small portions of caves, bouncing cameras posed at bad angles, and people screaming while the screen is in complete darkness, you'll love this movie. I could shut the lights off in my house and scream too, and I wouldn't have to pay for the rental. The only thing that scared me was that someone actually made a movie this awful.

... one of the worst movies I've ever rented.

Horror films are a curious thing, sometimes they manage to stumble across a formula that works very well, sometimes they try valiantly to tell a worthy story despite time and budget problems, sometimes they're so bad they're actually kinda fun...and sometimes they're "The Cavern".

A good horror/suspense film should contain vagaries that keep you guessing, they should allow you to be interested in the characters and their motivations so that you actually have some sort of reaction when they die. However, The Cavern chooses instead to introduce elements that work at first, only to be negated by it's own lackluster storytelling.

All the characters are completely forgettable and any actual back story that might make any of them even remotely interesting is blurted out within a 30 second monologue, making it impossible to do anything more than laugh as characters are picked off almost at random and on more than one occasion in the least possibly frightening way.

(To spoil a scene a bit, one victim is taken during a complete blackout which might have been a little frightening if the sound effect used to indicate his killing wasn't reminiscent of stirring a pot of too thick Macaroni and Cheese) Add to this formula the camera that work makes me think the director saw one too many Nine Inch Nails videos and an ending which in an attempt to be shocking serves almost no purpose but to annoy and confuse the viewer and you have an almost completely unwatchable horror film that fails on every level.

I'll be honest with you, if you want a claustrophobic caving horror movie go watch "The Descent", and I feel weird saying that because I didn't particularly enjoy that movie either.

What a shocker. For starters, I couldn't stand the constant screaming and noisy panicking all the time. It didn't make me scared, horrified, or make me sympathetic towards the characters; it was simply annoying. The jerky camera movements were also annoying. The plot was the same as pretty much every other cheap horror. There was a few pathetic attempts to give the characters some depth, but it didn't really work into the rest of the plot. And then there's the ending. I'm still not really sure what to make of it. I guess it was supposed to be clever twist, then shed some light on the situation, but it was just stupid.

The case had a couple of those little award winner/nominations symbols on it, so I figured it couldn't be too bad. I was wrong. If you see it, you should probably just leave it on the shelf.

There seems to have been some money behind this film, but it would be impossible to imagine a film this badly planned and executed if I hadn't actually started watching it.

To begin with, once we are in the cavern with the characters (the usual young adult stereotypes we've been meeting in horror films since the early '80s), the film is shot almost entirely in close-up. Since the actors are wearing helmet lights, this means all we see are glaring lights alternating with utter darkness - we never get to see what the characters see; so when they shout out "Look there!" we are left to beg "What?! Where?!". Ultimately the film has a nauseating, confusing strobe-light effect, with no sense to it until we get to the end.

And I won't tell you what 'the end' means - but you will recognize it if you've ever seen the old early '60s Arch Hall laugh fest"Eegah!" with Richard Kiel.

But what crazy person would ever want to make a variation on a theme like "Eegah!"'s, long remembered as one of the worst films ever made?! But that's what we have here, folks. Except that, unlike "Eegah!", "The Cavern" is not anyone's idea of goofy fun. It is unwatchable. (I ran it at x2 the normal speed, just to get it over with, hoping I would actually be able to see something by the end of the film; but when I did, it was just stupid.) This film did provide me with one satisfying moment, though; since it only cost a couple bucks, after I got it out of the DVD player, I was able to smash it with my own hands - what a relief!

A virtual carbon copy of The Cave save for a fewer lower budget effects and a slightly different plot. I knew the movie was going downhill when I saw the fake campfire flikering lights clearly reflected in a facial close up of one of the actors. The conflicts between characters and subplots seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever, and added nothing to the film except fewer moments of silence. The acting wasn't as bad as the typical B movie, and there was some believability in their fear, but as professional cavers, they seem to be too psychologically unstable for their chosen profession. Overall not worth wasting $4.50 to rent.