What Waits Below

The US military is running a test for a special type of radio transmitter in some caves in Nicaragua.When the signal from one of the transmitters suddenly disappears a team of soldiers,scientists and cave-specialists is sent to the cave to find what really happened.But the cave is not safe.It seems that a tribe of lemurian albino cave-dwellers lives there,who stalks its prey by their body heat."What Waits Below" is an overlooked horror movie,which obviously influenced Neil Marshall's 2005 horror hit "The Descent".Pretty creepy and entertaining horror flick with some suspense and effective scares.The action is fast and the infra-red stalking is a nice touch.7 out of 10.

In terms of plot, mid '80s subterranean horror/adventure What Waits Below is a lot like Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005), both films revolving around a group of speleologists running into trouble when the cavern that they are exploring turns out to be home to a race of savage underground humanoids. In execution, however, the two films couldn't be more different...

Where The Descent is an expertly crafted white-knuckle thrill ride that delivers cool cannibalistic creatures guaranteed to scare the bejeezuz out of the viewer, What Waits Below is a plodding cheeze-fest that offers up slimy hand-puppet snake monsters and laughable albinos with silly haircuts.

Robert Powell, who is most renowned for his titular role in Jesus of Nazareth, makes for an extremely lacklustre hero (could this guy really find work as a mercenary? He looks more like a hairdresser to me) and Lisa Blount is bland as the token babe with a brain. The real stars of the film are the stunning underground locations, but as awe inspiring as the spectacular caverns and colourful rock formations undoubtedly are, they cannot possibly adequately compensate for the stodgy direction, weak acting, cruddy props and terrible dialogue ("In a cave, the only predictable element is the unpredictable").

3.5/10, generously rounded up to 4 for the surprisingly gory shot of a dead soldier with his face all messed up.

I found the basic story incredible. However, when it comes to horror, stories generally are incredible; and I can think of many horror plots that are worse than this.

The plot to begin with is a bit muddled. It is not clear why these soldiers are in the jungle, and who the enemy at the beginning is, and it might have been a better idea to have the two factions slugging it out in the caves as well as having to deal with the rockman.

Nevertheless, the cast overcome the script, and Robert Powell shows that if you can play Jesus Christ you can play anything.

I am glad that the rockmen never got to talk. It would have been too much if they started speaking American English like the extra-terrestrials do on Star Trek.

All in all, this film is watchable.

IMDB should have this movie as Action/Adventure in the same vein as The Mummy (1999) or King Solomon's Mines (1985) which is about as good as What Waits Below but maybe on a even smaller budget.

Anyhow the story follows a mercenary who finds himself helping out some anthropologists uncover some subterranean culture that exists as a pretty small tribe. A small army outfit gets involved as they want to setup some tech underground for their own purposes. Obviously there are going to be conflicting interests within these groups and that's were the story gets interesting.

On the acting side; it was really good to see the beautiful Lisa Blount again as the only other time I saw her was in Dead and Buried (1981) a horror I definitely recommend as its one of my favourite mystery horrors of all time. Robert Powell also doesn't disappoint whom is always great in every role I've seen him play and it was equally interesting to see his take on playing the adventurer type its just a pity it was on such a low budget. Still a good movie and a must see of fans of these types of movies just don't go in expecting Indiana Jones.

Rupert 'Wolf' Wolfsen works for the US government, he is liaising with the US military in central America to help find a suitable cave where they wish to instigate a new top secret radio device for submarines?. They have trouble finding such a location until after a large landslide an entrance to just such a cave reveals itself. After setting up their equipment, they retire to base camp only to find that when they return the next morning, their irreplaceable transmitter has been taken and the guards dead. A search and rescue mission is authorised to go into the furthest reaches of the cave. Preposterous premise aside this was rather good fun, What Waits Below can only be described as a cross between Marshall's The Descent and Universals The Mole People, right down to the latter's albino civilisation who live there. Don Sharp just about retains an air of quality to proceedings, there may even be some pseudo political message in the ending.