In Vaulted Halls Entombed

Don't let another ensemble US marine cast cause your eyes to glaze over early.

What starts as a routine hostage extraction in the Afghan mountains takes an eldritch turn as the squad finds themselves venturing deeper under the mountains.

With slick visuals, great voice acting, and an ending that will scratch an itch for fans of season one's Beyond the Aquila Rift, "In Vaulted Halls Entombed" is an engaging taste of eldritch horror.

A Special Forces team tracking kidnap victims enter a cave where an ancient horror awaits in chains. Unfortunately the interesting premise and striking ending are marred by the clichéd 'bro-banter-tough-guy' wisecracking soldiers and the sometimes ridiculousness of their actions. The imagery is good although not overly imaginative.

It's a chilling story of a group of spec ops soldiers in pursuit of their goal. A cave, insurgents, a hostage, a harrowing discovery that turns into something, if your imagination allows it, that is supposedly supposed to drive any man insane at the mere thought.

It's really cool. A bit mundane of an ending, but what a cool reveal.

Netflix's "Love, Death and Robots" series returns for a Third run. Overall, I enjoyed the first two seasons and wrote short individual reviews for each episode and I think I'll take the same approach here.

A special forces team are tracking a hostage across the mountains of Afghanistan. They track and follow the terrorists into a cave system and, after discovering some skeletons, stripped of all flesh, discover that the dark holds a threat worse than any they were anticipating. But as they head deeper and deeper in, they discover an ancient horror, imprisoned, but yearning for freedom.

I often like the idea of the usage of Eldritch horror in media, more than I end up liking the execution, but this was, I thought, pretty well done. It's not extraordinary visually, but about par with higher end video game cut scenes - which makes sense if it was made in the unreal engine. The characters played by Joe Manganiello, Jai Courtney and Christian Serratos looked like the actors enough that I recognised them without the voices. The vocal performances are fine though, even if there's not much in the way of emotion to display and the dialogue isn't up to much.

It's a solid little short story combining an initial genuine threat with the more psychological aspects of the ancient evil using it's powers on the survivors to try and get out.

Or rather, lack of ending... Pretty decent one, not a bad story, decent way the story is told, well established characters for something this short... BUT... Too many questions left unanswered and eventually makes you ask yourself "what exactly was I watching here and why"?