The Cave - In the shadow of ‘The Decent’

There’s plenty of instances where two films come out practically at the same time and have exactly the same premises, i.e. Volcano vs Dante’s Peak, Armageddon vs Deep Impact, Shark’s Tale vs Finding Nemo and so on.  Here, a film about a not-so-lucky band of caving explorers who found themselves trapped underground at the mercy of a pack of slobbering monsters really resonated with horror audiences.  And this film was called ‘The Decent.’ Therefore, when the (slightly less imaginatively-titled) ‘The Cave’ was released at roughly the same time and also able to be summed up in a similar statement, no one really noticed.

And that’s a shame, but ‘The Cave’ isn’t that bad.  Okay, so that’s hardly high praise, but we are talking about films in terms of horror movies here, so I’m sure its core audience is hardly expecting deep and meaningful character development or overarching story arcs.  What most horror fans are looking for is a few nice kills, the odd gruesome monster and characters you sort of what to root for over whatever is trying to murder them.  And, based on that appraisal of the horror audience’s collective desires, I think ‘The Cave’ ticks all boxes.

As I previously mentioned a group of caving explorers are trapped in a subterranean nightmare when a pack of beasties start having them for lunch.  What follows is your generic monster movie where they’re offed one by one, but each character is just about well-rounded enough for you to noticed when they’re being devoured and you’ll probably have fun trying to work out who’s going to live and who’s going to die first (hint: the film does its best not to succumb to the obvious when it comes to character deaths!).  I’m guessing a fair part of the movie was filmed in a studio set to save on actors really going underground, so I’m assuming the caves were fake, but they looked pretty reasonable and the film’s budget must have gone some way on the sets.  Unfortunately, that means that the monsters are a little under-developed and you only catch glimpses of them here and there for the most part.

Fans of ‘Game of Thrones’ may enjoy seeing one of Lena Headley’s less-known early performances and – for me, anyway – is about the only recognisable face among the cast.

There’s nothing new here and, yes, The Decent probably does everything on offer here better.  However, if – like me – you’re a fan of the monster-munching genre then there should be enough here to keep you entertained for an hour and a half.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that