Wasted potential

Rating: 5/10 (6 August 2006)

I started out liking this movie, for about 40 minutes. The premise is interesting: six adventurous women go to get thrills in a cave and supposedly confront their inner demons, Deliverance-style. The movie looks good, and the women are fine while you can see them. There are many knowing, winking references to Deliverance--the bluegrass music, the whitewater rafting in the beginning of the film, the decrepit Appalachian shacks... (there are also references to Apocalypse Now and 28 Days Later and Alien, and, unfortunately and possibly unintentionally, Tomb Raider...). The film falls apart, though, when it starts relying on cheap scare tactics--those sudden shrill sound coming out of nowhere that startle the girls sitting next to you but leave you wondering what the point was.
There are many problems with the exposition and character development. I thought there were at least two girls too many in the film--once they get dirty in the cave, they are impossible to keep track of, especially since we didn't really get to know some of them well enough to care about what happens to them. The action scenes suffer from the typical Western problems: you can't SEE what's going on because the cuts are too fast. It's like the filmmakers don't want you to know just how much they cheated in the scene.
SPOILER:
I know I should have left my disbelief at the door when I went in to see this film, but the cave-dwelling creatures are just ridiculous. The action wasn't riveting enough to distract me away from all the implausibilities of their, uh, evolutionary descent. So they live in total darkness and rely only on hearing to track their prey? You'd think that smell, too, would come in handy. Also, does this cave and the surrounding woods really have enough animals and people to support this many human-sized crawlers? A predator's habitat usually develops an equilibrium dictated by the prey-to-predator ratio. And why are all but one of them male? Well, this is just one of the things that ruined the film for me.
I'd say it will come short of becoming a cult classic. It's not solid enough to be seriously good, and the problems aren't funny enough to make it a Mystery Science Theater item.