Nowhere near as bad as I feared

Rating: 6/10 (23 January 2017)

This movie has "Coverfield" in the name, and shares at least a director with that earlier movie. In fact, I bought it on blu-ray in a double pack. So, having seen the earlier movie, which was a very humdrum affair in all respects except the visual arts, I wasn't expecting much.
In fact, I was pleasantly surprised. 10CL centres on the tense relationships between three people confined -- willingly or not -- in a survival bunker. Some unspecified "attack" has taken place, and it seems that the outside world is uninhabitable. It looks OK, however, through the airlock window, so the real situation is unclear. As the movie progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the owner of the bunker is somewhat unstable, and may even be a murderer. The three folks in the bunker are the only actors with more than a couple of lines, and all the performances are excellent.
But (spoiler coming...) Having seen Cloverfield, I always assumed that space monsters or some-such would be involved somewhere. I mean, why would the filmmakers choose this name except to make that exact connection? This rather killed the suspense for me. Had the link been unclear -- had it been uncertain right up until the last moment whether the surface was safe or not -- it would have been a better movie. Sure, "Howard" -- the bunker's owner -- is a fruitcake, and he may have a sinister motive for keeping a young woman trapped. But that in no way precludes a genuine disaster having taken place as well.
There is an FAQ entry attached to this IMDb entry that says, essentially, that the film-makers did not intend any particular relationship between 10CL and Cloverfield. It's true that we don't see the same monsters, and there are continuity problems if the events in 10CL are intended to follow directly after those in Cloverfield. But I assumed right from the start that when Howard suggested the world had been invaded by "Martians", he was referring to the events in Cloverfield. So when the monsters eventually appeared, I was not surprised. I'm only surprised that other reviewers found the ending genuinely unexpected -- I can only imagine that they never saw Cloverfield, or had forgotten its plot.
In short, this is a potentially excellent movie, slightly let down by the plot give-away inherent in its title and authorship.