As summer winds itself down to nothing this weekend, I thought I’d take in one last summer movie. Which, in the case of late August/early September, means something hurtfully pointless and ill-made, dropped in theaters by afterthought on its swift route to the video store.
Because A Sound of Thunder has been denied to me, I decided that my backup would be The Cave, a cheap little genre exercise about a group of spelunkers who find dreadful nastiness in a huge cave system in the Romanian mountains. This is the sort of film in which Piper Parabo counts as the “star factor,” although Daniel Dae Kim from Lost is here too. There are a bunch of other people, most of whom are eaten.
This is one of those “creature” driven pictures, so of course the actors are really beside the point. It’s all about the monsters. Here, they are giant bats that can swim. By the time the movie tells you where they came from, you have already figured it out. Of course, they really come from the movie Alien, but it would be poor form to point that out.
I walked in to the theater expecting High Camp, such as Anaconda or Bats. I was disappointed. Everything here is so utterly typical as to destroy the true Bad Movieness of the enterprise. But I do not want to mislead you into thinking it’s not bad. It is very bad. It’s the kind of bad where it can’tbother to keep the clichéd stock characters straight (as when the Angry Also-Ran Kid Brother suddenly morphs into True Believer In His Brother’s Skills). It is the kind of film in which the line of dialogue, “We’ve always been part of the food chain. We just forgot that in the cities,” can appear, and be treated as profound wisdom.
But there’s something far too depressingly competent about the movie. There is no what the hell were they thinking?!?! moment, the true marker of a great awful B-film. I know what they were thinking. They were thinking that they might be able to squeeze out a few million dollars from a bone-dry August. But I guess that’s the way of the industry. They don’t even make shit like they used to.
3/10