Underground

After a fight gets out of hand a group of friends run for cover but find themselves fighting for their lives against ravenous creatures lurking beneath their rave party.

Over dramatic, low budget horror flick that has some fantastic makeup and special effects in amongst the unnecessary fights,hammy dialogue and slow motion scenes.

Underground starts off very promising with the opening of an army squad fending off some nasty looking super genetic humanoids, then director Rafael Eisenman introduces us to an underground rave in an air hanger on a military base that goes on far too long. Writer Charles Morris Jr. borrows heavily from Marshall's Descent (2005) and Smith's Creep (2004).

Underground's weakest link is that it's not very tight and scenes are drawn out. It's well lit and shot with some good pumping tracks in the soundtrack.The score is a mixed bag there's some great music cues but then it borrows from familiar scores and overcooks them.

The young cast of actors including Eric Abercrombie and Mira Antonova do there best with the script. The Eli Wallach with a German accent lookalike aside - there's some nice touches, a creature bursting out of urinal, torn off ears, lobbed off arms, spooky tunnels and creepy corridors.

A lot of effort has clearly gone into Underground, it has a 'film' look and with some tighter editing it may have helped the viewing experience. Rafael Eisenman uses every film trick in the book and clearly has ability but it just isn't a polished enough production, nevertheless it's a lot bloodier, effective and atmospheric than the abundance of cheap looking horror DTV films.

Despite it's unevenness there's worst ways to burn a hour and a half.

Being in the "biz" it was more or less evident to me that this film was unfinished and it's a shame that it was released this way since it had the potential to be a decent B horror flick.

Aside from some unremarkable acting (which is excusable when dealing with low budget horrors) the score and cinematography were competently executed. Make-up and special effects were decent aside from one horrendous CGI shot of snow. Where we get into trouble is in the edit.

An unforgivable number of scenes were disjointed and leaves the audience wondering "what is going on," "where am I now" or "who am I looking at?" I've seen such scenes before in what we call an assembly or rough cut. This is when the editor takes his/her first stab at a complete edit. It's usually after this that the production team gets a clear idea of what scenes need to be re-shot or what extra shots are needed to make the edit work or flow.

For whatever reason (lack of funding, actor availability, location no longer available, etc.) this was clearly not done which makes the film extremely frustrating to follow.

I recommend staying clear of this one. I'm a huge fan of horror films but I ended up fast forwarding the last 10 minutes just to get to the end because my brain got tired of trying to fill in the gaps.

Neil Marshall's THE DESCENT was a fine stab at a survival horror yarn, featuring some excellent locations (those dank and dismal caves were a perfect backdrop for the scares) and a race of nasty villains who seemed to be descended from Gollum. UNDERGROUND is a cheap and nasty American version of the above, with the setting swapped to an underground military bunker.

Unfortunately, UNDERGROUND has much in common with modern-day B-movies as it's the kind of film you watch and mildly enjoy in places, but soon forget about once the credits roll. The script and production values of this film are poor, with much of the running time consisting of too much repetitive wandering around in semi-darkness. Needless to say the characters are bland and undistinguished, with nobody to root for.

The monsters in the film are passable, and I enjoyed the couple of fight scenes that we get here and there (the choreography isn't too shabby). As with many B-movies, the gore content is ramped up to compensate for failings elsewhere, and there are a couple of great gags involving eyeball violence and a twist on the old "ripped in half" joke. Sadly, the film as a whole is just too dark and bland to be worth watching, though.

These kids are all supposed to be military or trained? 3 minutes in there's a fight and the fighting is worse than Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which I love). When the girl does a roundhouse kick on another girls face, I mentally checked out. I'm a former soldier. None of these attitudes or decision making is remotely military trained. Or any kind of trained. The over testosterone level guys are a bit much even for a Marine! All thumbs down, one star.

I'll make this very short & easy: don't waste your precious time watching this atrocity. It's a complete insult to the senses.

Photography in this film is horrible. Acting is laughable. Music is bad. FX are mostly C grade, especially makeup & CGI (practical ones are kinda OK though). There's way better editing on an average YouTube video. And the acting is bad, bad, bad. Oh, did I already said that? Well...that's how bad it is.

But by far the worst offender here is the script. Some truly ghastly experiments created some really nasty creatures. So the movie starts with a really lame "search & destroy" military operation going bad. 2 years later the site is home of a rave party (!) and a group of friends end up trapped underground. 2 yrs? 2 yrs!? That's it? So the government sends a black ops team to an underground military bunker and everyone dies. So naturally that's it. Game over. Let's just forget everything about that place and keep going. No "hey, maybe we should go and check if someone got out of there alive" or something? Nah. The creatures we wanted dead will probably die of old age. Why bother, right? And that's only the beginning. I'm not going to say anything else because I don't wanna spoil "the fun" for any masochist out there, willing to waste 80+ minutes watching this thing. But you have characters doing the most dumb and unreasonable things. A couple of veteran soldiers that display no real knowledge of military tactics or anything useful whatsoever, other than telling sad war stories. Characters pulling "facts" and knowledge out of thin air, knowing things there's no way they could possibly know. Things happening one minute and other things contradicting the first ones happening on the next minute without any sort of rational explanation. There's even a scene where a guy takes off his shirt and do almost nothing for 3+ minutes just to show his abs (seriously, there's no real reason for it, not even in the scene's context that demands quickness and taking off your clothes will waste very valuable time). And I'm not even going to mention the dreadful & incoherent ending. I've seen bad movies with bad scripts. But this is one of the worst ones. The story here is like something a teenager wrote for a high school essay. I can't believe a professional writer did such an awful job.

This movie has zero redeeming qualities. Not even a couple of one liners or some cool jokes here & there. It's just plain bad. With emphasis on the plain aspect. There's really no reason to watch it. Not even to make fun of it. -1/10