Curse of the Mayans

As with most movies, the last twenty minutes are where the good stuff happens and things are wrapped up. In this case, the last twenty minutes got a bit confused. There was a definite conclusion and it seemed to fit the rest of the story, but it had more potential and it left a lot of questions unanswered.

Things got weird in a hurry and then sort of slipped into another movie.

In any event, the acting was pretty decent and nobody got too melodramatic until the last few minutes. The scary guys were a bit weird and overdone. The ultimate ending was a bit odd and there was no explanation as to why the other players couldn't do whatever by themselves.

If you can see it for free, it's not too bad.

The 2 cave divers you see diving in the real cave were diving with 2 side mount cylinders as well as a smaller cylinder (deco or bailout bottle) and were wearing normal scuba masks, one with helmet with 2 lights on the side (typical cave gear). Yet when you see ALL the divers come up, they are wearing full face masks, only have a single centre back mount tank. They also talk about being low on O2 (not air) and earlier discussed oxygen percentages they had left. It should have been how many PSI or Bar they had left. I'm sure they just took some stock footage of cave divers and put the rest in, but even non divers can tell the difference in gear.

Subtitles, bad dialogue, slooooooow until the monsters finally show up and then, it doesn't get much better.

This wasn't even enjoyable as bad sci-fi.

Low budget is not a curse untill it meets low scriptwriting, confusing shooting and editing, hilarious dialogues, sound probably recorded on Nokia 3310 and... well THAT acting. Actually this movie is quiet a masterpiece. You can show it to a film school students as an example how do NOT make movies.

...unfortunately this one gets worse by the minute from around 40min onwards, until the agonizingly boring and pointless crescendo of the last 16min when you wish it could end sooner.

This is not made up to drag it down, just my thoughts while enduring this, hoping it would somehow pickup and suddenly get a turn to the positive (entertaining film-making).

All in all there were many potential opportunities to make this better, into an entertaining horror flick a la the descent, or with romance, action, artefacts and humor like the ol'classic romancing the stone, or pure short paced action a la Tomb Raider, Raiders of the lost arc or Uncharted. No, this one just got lamer by the minute. Yes I got the idea what the writers got in mind, and appreciate the attempted twist of mayan prophecy and the connection to the world at present day, but - it simply failed to entertain.

(the most shocking sequence and proof of a lack of idea? Was a backflash to a 40s conversation between the main protagonists about the evil beings, just a few minutes earlier in the film. How boring can something get when you are already bored)

All in all I dont write many negative reviews, just vote, but this annoyed me a bit. Have to watch something better now.