Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

26th Kill

What is so fucking unbearable about movies like this? A rating of 2.2? What the fuck do people think they're firing up when they put this one on? Were you expecting some kind of Bergmanesque psychological drama? A profound meditation on the nature of modern spelunking? What do people want from a movie like this? If I spot a poster or cover like this, I want a simple horror-thriller with a group of insufferable alphas getting picked off in nasty ways, preferably with some cool monsters, and that's exactly what The Cave gave me. Maybe it's just the era in which this came out - the entire decade of the aughts produced quite a lot of genre films which everyone seemed to hate on over the last ten years but which are probably due a reappraisal.

This is nowhere near as effective a horror film as something like The Descent, mainly because it seems to hesitate to go really graphic on the kills. I don't know if they were trying to avoid an R rating or it just got expurgated later on, but it's a shame, because this film would be truly excellent with more gore and brutality on screen.

The creature concept here is really cool - it reminded me a lot of the Austrian film Blood Glacier which is an underseen gem. The idea that it's not just one kind of monster but an entire ecosystem of death is incredibly fun - we get so many kinds of threat, and with the characters having to spend so much time swimming, there's even an aquatic horror aspect to go with the underground tropes. This is the essence of horror's appeal to me - the genre as a playground full of tropes which get trotted out and reused and morphed and twisted in creative ways. I guess the very thing that detractors use to disparage horror - that it's "derivative" [gasp] - is exactly what attracts me to it.

This movie rocks. It rocks. Because cave, rock... When will the world recognise my comedy genius? smh

Best Kill (may contain traces of spoiler)

The kills are a slight disappointment - this is not a movie that should make you use your imagination too much. But I'm going to let Daniel Dae Kim take the award, because his cheekbones are sharp enough to cut glass (I've seen it, what a party trick) and because he dies after getting a stalactite fall and spear him through the leg (The 'mites go up and the 'tites come down through Daniel Dae Kim's leg, as the geologists' mnemonic goes) but does that do him in? Daniel is too tough to be speared by a mere shard of rock! Unfortunately, he's not too tough to get his head chomped by a mutant gargoyle thing, so Dan Dae goes the way of the dodo.