In the interest of full disclosure I can tell you there was very little way a movie like "The Cave" was going to get more than two stars. Maybe two-and-a-half if the filmmakers really put in some extra effort. Three if the heavens were smiling down. It's not that I'm not some kind of snob or anything; I love a good "Alien" rip-off as much as the next guy. Even
"Pitch Black" had its moments. And in all honesty, I have a real weakness for the kind of movie that dares to start with a title card that reads "Cold War Romania - 30 Year Ago" before continuing on to "Carpathian Mountains - Present Day." So to its credit "The Cave" absolutely had me at "hello".
In case you haven't guessed from the title, here's the setup: a group of hotshot spelunkers (yep, you read that right) finds themselves trapped miles underground with a particularly vicious beast out of the H.R. Giger fall catalog. With mercifully little exposition first-time director Bruce Hunt gets our intrepid team underground. Almost immediately, as you might guess, our heroes get cut off. So too, unfortunately, does any sense of suspense.
Firstly, for a film called "The Cave" there sure was a lot of light coming from somewhere down there. Actually, aside from being trapped, it didn't seem like such a bad place to be. While there are one or two claustrophobic moments, you rarely get the feeling that this group is much further away from civilization than the door off the soundstage.
Cole Hauser (also in "Pitch Black") gives a typically bland performance (also in "Pitch Black") as the group's leader. Piper Perabo, hoping we've forgotten "Coyote Ugly" (we haven't), shows up along with the lovely Lena Headey to provide some window dressing. That's about all I have to say about the characters aside from the fact that it took a lot of will power to keep the word characters out of double-quotes.
Of course, it's not like this kind of movie needs much character development if there's at least an interesting monster running about. The problem with "The Cave" is the creature itself, which moves like "Alien", sees like "Predator" and looks different in every shot. Mr. Hunt does his best to create scary "attack montages", but he can't hide the fact that the script by Michael Steinberg and Tegan West put as little thought into the monster as they did into the title.
There's some technobabble explanation about "genetic mutation", a "closed ecosystem" and I think I even heard the word "primeval" in there somewhere but none of that counts for anything if the film can't come up with the goods. And in that regard, "The Cave" lets us even further down than the titular fissure. On the upside, however, at least I got to use the word "spelunker".
