I went to see this movie to kill some time. I remember Cole Hauser in "Tigerland", and although his acting is wooden, he does portray a tough "leader" character. Same here. This movie was about a bunch of young, hot scientists and divers exploring a cave in Romania that one has to dive to see. The beginning scene was very interesting, with a bunch of Romanian or Russian men exploring the cave in search of booty. Flash forward 30 years, and we have a team of divers called in by some scientist and his crew to explore some cave for some unknown scientific purpose. 

There is a lot of clichéd, useless talk. The women are too hot for their jobs, let's face it. I hate to watch the lips of these women talk about the guys while drinking beer at the pre-cave exploration party. I mean it was like we were at some bar with frat and sorority types talking about the opposite sex--not a group of scientists and divers. Every character had ZERO personality, with perhaps exception of the scientist, who at least wasn't one of the young and beautiful people. So, the acting, although workmanlike, was not inspiring. 

The dialog was pretty bad. At one point in the movie, Cole Hauser ("Jack"), the lead diver--his irises morph into the Cingular wireless symbol, and stay like that. We are led to believe that, since he was scratched by one of these monsters, that he is turning into one of them. Fair enough. But first of all, nobody says the obvious thing to him: "What is up with your EYES, dude??" No. Everybody just talked about how he's "changed" and that he should not be the leader of the group anymore. And then this guy says, "you see how he's not HUMAN". Huh? If they really believed he was a friggin' monster, then why not act like it? Instead, the group splits in two--those who go with Jack, and those who go their separate ways, I guess thinking him to be a monster. It makes no sense.

The best scene in the movie was this blonde diver woman crawls up a cave wall, and gets attacked by this goblin. Her scream really sucked--but she fought like hell to dispatch the goblin.

The photography was fine when the camera was STILL. But any action sequences, the director found it useful to confuse the hell out of us by flashing bubbles, flashlights, dark space, god knows what. I wish they would just show us a scene straight once in awhile. Just because you move the camera all over the place doesn't make the movie any SCARIER, folks. 

This movie could have been a lot better if the following changes had been made:

1. every actor was replaced by someone who looked real. Let Cole Hauser be the lead, it's OK to let him be the good-looking one. I'm getting tired of seeing 20-something supermodel scientists. Give me a break, people!

2. The cinematographer was fired, and replaced by one who just pointed the camera and sat still. This could be the director's fault, I don't know. Jumpy camera (as in Constant Gardener) is getting old, folks.

3. We got to see the goblins actually devour the people. How bout some gore? There's not much else in this movie. We barely got to see the creatures--I felt a little ripped off about that. 

4. The ending was pretty lame. During the denouement, the sexy British scientist has a secret...guess what that is? It's a bit canned. The ending would have been better if they all died instead of the Black guy (Morris Chestnut), who seemed to breathe a little sympathy into his character just by his worried expressions. All the other actors had NO expression.

I gave it a 4 out of 10, because after all, the acting was without noticeable errors, and the concept was fairly original. I'd like to see Cole do more military roles--he's good at it.

Sentiment: negative