Director:
Bruce Hunt
Writers:
Michael Steinberg & Tegan West
Cast:
Cole Hauser ………. Jack
Morris Chestnut ……… Top Buchanan
Eddie Cibrian ……… Tyler
Rick Ravanello ……… Briggs
Marcel Iures ………Dr. Nicolai
Kieran Darcy-Smith ………Strode
Daniel Dae Kim………Kim
Lena Headey ……… Kathryn
Piper Perabo ……… Charlie
Screen Gems and Lakeshore Entertainment/Cinerenta present a Lakeshore Entertainment Production in association with City Productions and Cineblue.
Running Time: 97 Minutes. Rated PG-13 (For intense creature violence.)
The Movie
I’m gonna do a brief plot summary of The Cave here because, even if you have watched it, the film doesn’t give you any clue what is going on at any particular moment. So here we go:
The movie starts with a team of Europeans driving around in Romania. They wander into a church for no particular reason. The fall through a mosaic, and turn on their flashlights.
Thirty years later, a bunch of folk are exploring a Romanian mountain for no particular reason. The somehow open up a big hole. The hole has water in it, so they decide to call in some diving experts.
Over in the Yucatan a bunch of pretty people are diving for no particular reason. Then day turn to night and they get a video e-mail asking them to come to Romania. They do this thing.
They go to Romania, meet up with some more attractive people, and go into the mountain, so that they can wander around in the dark and swim.
All of this takes about 20 minutes, but it feels more like 80. After that they spend about an hour spelunking, SCUBAing, and occasionally take the time to fight off a bunch of silly looking monsters.
The Cave is a bad movie. It’s not even an enjoyable bad movie. You see, it keeps on toeing the line of competence. That is to say, it isn’t incompetent enough to make fun of while watching it. Do stupid things happen? Sure, but not so stupid that it is funny. It’s just kinda sad stupid.
Grievances with the movie:
1. The story-telling is awful. We ever get a sense of where the creature is, what is happening, and why its happening. I blame you, Bruce Hunt!
2. Usually drinking makes these movies better, but the slightest bit of alcohol makes the movie even more incomprehensible.
3. The movie is PG-13.
4. The Creature is ridiculously bad in its design and in performance. The bad CGI looks like bad CGI. The guy in a rubber suit looks like a guy in a rubber suit.
5. There are extended moments of nearly complete darkness.
6. There are too many characters that are too much alike. If the audience can’t keep track of the characters, they won’t care when they are killed off.
7. No cool death scenes. This movie is nearly devoid of coolness.
8. It is really, really f*cking boring.
Things about the movie that rock (or at the very least, are kinda neat):
1. The characters have ridiculous names like Strode and Top.
2. They kill off that bitch from Coyote Ugly
3. Jin from “Lost” is in it and one of the guys from “Invasion.”
4. Cole Hauser has a career that is struggling about the direct to DVD bin, but take my word for it, this guy might have Dolph Lungren-like potential.
5. It features an actor named ZOLTAN.
With apologies to Joe-Bob, Drive in totals:
?? Dead bodies, semi-undead bodies, demon-fu, flame thrower-fu, sonic gun fu, underwater spelunking, gratuitous Piper Perabo, Piper Perabo dry-humped by a monster, 0 car crashes, 0 breasts.
Score: 2.5/10
The DVD
The Audio and The Visual:
This is a new movie. I imagine it looks and sounds as good as it is supposed to look and sound. I have no impressive system to test this stuff. I can’t say that I really give a rat’s ass. It says it is in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen. Whoopie!
The Box
I have to mention two things about the box.
1. The picture on the front shows a giant fanged vagina (vagina dentata). Inside the opening it says, “There are places man was never meant to go.”
2. Instead of having a chapter list, or anything of value inside the box, there is just one sheet of advertisement for other movies, most of which suck.
Special Features
“Into the Cave”: 20 minutes of swimming with expert divers. As exciting to me as watching ice turn into water.
Designing Evolution: Tatopoulos Studios”: Ten minutes of how a skeezy fella with annoying accent designed a shitty monster. Not very exciting.
Filmmakers’ Commentary: Standard boring commentary track, where the director and company verbally fellate their diving crew, casually talk about how they whimsically made last minute illogical changes, and admire each other.
Writers’ Commentary: This thing caught me off guard. At first, it was the writers talking about how cool Alien and Jaws are, but then it turned into something else entirely. Barely masking their bitterness, the writers openly mock the movie.
They point out a bunch of the director’s ineptness, the stuff they were forced to change, the stuff that was cut out, how their pacing was f*cked up, how stupid looking the monster is, etc.
They say shit like, “Why does the creature have these giant wings? It lives in a cave!” and “That is what was supposed to be happening there; I don’t know if that really came through to the audience.” and “I don’t know why the director made that decision. That is just silly.”
The writer’s commentary track is much better than the film itself. It offers a unique insight into the movie that was conceived, the movie that they wrote, the movie they were forced to write, the movie that was filmed, and the abomination into which it was edited.
The writers are far from geniuses, artistic or otherwise, and there are more than a few dashes of pretension, but it is a wonderful look into the soul-killing desperation of the screenwriter.
Score: 5/10
