The 1954 horror flick The Creature from the Black Lagoon is still one of Hollywood's best creature features.
Its monster has become known as The Gill Man and he ranks right up there with such other famous movie monsters as Frankenstein's creature, the Wolf Man and Dracula.
He was a prehistoric creature locked in an underwater world who suddenly gets released into ours.
For about 30 minutes, The Cave looked like it might just be The Creature from the Romanian Lagoon.
Scientists find a massive underwater cavern system miles below the ruins of a 13th century abbey in Romania. They send in three of their own people with a team of cave divers to explore what they believe is a valuable eco-system.
They want to know what life forms have been evolving down there.
Sadly, because there is as surprisingly little originality in Hollywood design studios as there is in script offices these days, the lurking foe is a cousin of the extraterrestrial creature that menaced Sigourney Weaver in her Alien flicks.
Sure it's like a big bat when it flies but that head is like every other monster we've seen since Alien.
That doesn't mean the ravenous monster isn't creepy, but it all smacks of imitation rather than originality.
The scariest thing about The Cave is its settings.
The humans who get trapped in this underground, and often underwater world, have to squeeze themselves through narrow dark passages. For anyone with even a hint of claustrophobia these sequences are downright unnerving.
The crew is a pretty routine cinema group.
There are the feuding brothers (Cole Hauser and Eddie Cibrian), the level-headed friend (Morris Chestnut), a loud-mouth dissenter (Rick Ravanello), an aging scientist (Marcel Iures) and his beautiful assistant (Lena Heady), their trusty Asian cameraman (Daniel Dae Kim) and a sexy rock climber (Piper Perabo).
It's up to the audience to guess in which order they become food for the creatures.
It will come as no surprise to fans of sci-fi thrillers that the creature has a way of getting inside at least one of the crew.
Now if this were a Creature from the Black Lagoon clone instead of an Alien one, the monster would have become besotted with one of the women.
It worked for King Kong, Frankenstein's creature and The Gill Man, but sadly the creature in The Cave is just an eating machine.
The Cave delivers the B-grade thrills its premise and trailers promise and that's about all we should expect.
The bonus is it is slick schlock movie making.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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