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PLOT: Divers go spelunking in a legendary Romanian cave system hidden under a church, only to find monstrous ghouls eager to feed on their flesh. And doesn't that suck?
The new sci-fi horror flick The Cave raises one crucial question: Why can't Hollywood come up with a fresh design for their man-eating monsters?
The ill-tempered, long-fanged, flesh-eating ghouls who inhabit The Cave look like mutant descendants of the aliens in the Alien franchise.
Sure, these ghastly cave dwellers have been crossed with bats, given both human and reptillian DNA and then turned into albinoesque Johnny Winter clones by a life of subterranean darkness. But they still look too familiar, too generic, too damned digital. And they sound ridiculous.
The basic design, especially that funky face, has been used in a whole generation of sci-fi horror movies, including Pitch Black. That movie's creature creator Patrick Tatopoulos authored the monsters in The Cave, so the connection is not incidental. Familiarity breeds contempt.
Every monster movie also needs victims. Our emotional commitment to the movie, and therefore the intensity of our subconscious response to terror, is determined by how well the human characters are developed before they start dying.
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In The Cave, Australian-born, first time director Bruce Hunt does a routine job. All the characters are standard-issue, nobody is special, the acting is banal. You don't really give a hoot when anybody dies.
It does not help that the script, credited to Michael Steinberg and Tegan West, has stupid lines of dialogue, including real howlers. And even through there is authentic diving tech-talk, and plenty of impressive underwater photography, the movie drowns in bogus science.
As for the so-called plot, it is paint-by-numbers time. There is a prologue set in Romania 30 years ago as fortune-hunters discover the cave system, only to meet their doom. Flash forward as a scientific expedition is mounted to explore the caves, with the help of a crack team of American scuba divers and cave spelunkers. It is Alien Vs. Predator in a cave.
The heroes have to be Americans. This is a Hollywood movie. No foreign heroes are welcome. The team is led by Cole Hauser, Morris Chestnut, Eddie Cibrian, Rick Ravenello (who is actually Canadian -- but he portrays a psycho-loser) and Piper Perabo as the ultra-fit eye candy. Foreign types are allowed as academic experts. So Lena Heady and Marcel Iures have accents, Heady as the obligatory sexy scientist and Iures as the wise old man with a beard.
A warning to hard core horror fans: The Cave is tame in both language and carnage, almost kid-friendly for a movie in this genre. Buyer beware.
(This film is rated 14-A)