The Cave

Review by Jason Gaston

The thing about The Cave that eats my lunch more than anything else is that, with the help of a decent writer and a more competent director, the setting and story of this movie could have been a strikingly original horror movie. Has it stands now though, this is unremarkable, completely scareless, joyless, and a hundred percent unoriginal.

The thing about The Cave that serves as a beacon of hope that something... anything about this movie will be unique and interesting is the cave itself, serving only as a set piece quietly and patiently waiting in vain to be taken advantage of as the entire movie turns into a lame Aliens clone.

It's not a huge shock, but The Cave is about people exploring a cave that has never before been explored. Only, when they get a little deeper into the cave they discover that it actually has been explored before and that those explorers have met an untimely end.

Later, after a cave-in seals off their way back to the surface, they are soon picked off one by one by these bizarre monsters living in the abyss.

But are these monsters really monsters? They're not and the movie really gives away that particular plot twist too early in a couple of scenes that I can only guess were added for the special ed crowd.

This movie is dull. I know that I've never been a strong advocate of humor in a horror movie, but I think that a couple of well-placed jokes in this dreary depressing movie would have been tolerable. Heck, after about an hour of this killjoy I was so depressed that I felt like blowing my brains out. How something can be made that is this downbeat and this bereft of any positive energy is amazing. Don't they do rewrites and reshoots because of problems like this?

What's worse is that this movie is full of stupid characters doing stupid things and it's so obvious when one of the spelunkers is going to bite it that there is no shock and no surprise.

This is a stupid movie. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Stupid in its execution and stupid in the way that it didn't take advantage of the setting it was placed in. Even when the movie actually takes a stab at getting half-way intelligent towards the end when one of the characters says that the creatures inside the cave were trying to get out of the labyrinth, you have to slap yourself in the forehead and yell, "what was stopping them all this time!?"

Stupid!