Plot
Disguised as extreme adventurers, a
group of thieves hire a caving expert to take them into an old mine in
Switzerland which was shut down years earlier after a mysterious cave in.
The thieves are looking for a hidden cavern full of emeralds but what they
find there is a horde of hungry giant beetles.
Review
I've seen some crap in my time. I mean
nothing can beat the likes of Killjoy, Bog, Raging Sharks
or Camp Blood in the crap stakes. However there comes a time
when one crosses paths with a film so determined to succeed and which
clearly thinks that it is any good but which fails so dramatically in every
department like this nonsense, Caved In: Prehistoric Terror. Another
Sci-Fi Channel production which has a kick ass cover (I am so gullible in
falling for them every time!) and sounds like a bit of fun which turns out
to be more painful than having a tooth removed. I know recycling is good for
the environment but someone needs to tell filmmakers that recycling films
will not help the ozone layer any time soon. Caved In: Prehistoric Terror
comes off as a really bad cross between The Descent and Starship
Troopers....and a really bad one at that.
Things don't look good from the start when you're given the
back story to the mine and the original cave in. Some not-very-good actors
get sliced and diced by some even worse-looking beetles. Note to the
director and writer: If you're going to kick things off by showing how bad
your monsters are, then there's no hope for the rest of the film. They could
have easily killed the miners off without revealing the beetles so early on
(you know, have them killed off-screen or in the dark - or even use a
prosthetic mandible) but alas, they don't and the film wastes it trump card
within the first five minutes. So by now, you're already depressed to hell
knowing that you've got to suffer another eighty minutes and worrying that
things won't get any better. Believe me, they get somehow worse. We're
introduced to the team of thieves. We know they're bad guys because they
butcher some old guy to get their hands on a map. Oh, they're also foreign
and one of these is bald with a goatee. They've got to be evil. We then move
to the caving expert and his family, one of the least believable families
I've seen for a long time. The dad looks like he just left a hospital, the
mother can't act to save her life, the son clearly won the part via a
competition and the daughter, well, she's a piece of ass in the "trying to
look older than she is" category (the actress was born in 1982 so that's ok
- don't arrest me!). I'm not going to do a scene-by-scene synopsis of the
film because that would be too painful for me to rekindle memories of things
I want to banish. But needless to say these all of these combustible
characters together doesn't make for pretty viewing, especially when none of
them do anything straightforward. The main bad guy, Marcel, continues to
make ridiculous mistakes which only hamper their efforts to get out alive.
He only too willingly kills his men for dramatic effect when he should
clearly realise that seven people versus a horde of giant bugs is better than
four.
For some reason, some of his men are armed with pulse rifles. Don't ask me,
I didn't even think they existed. The pulse rifles simply add more silly
special effects to an already overcrowded CGI fest. All the characters seem
to do is run, shoot the bugs and run a bit more. Repeat this for about sixty
minutes and you have the bulk of the film.
The bugs look bad, as I've already mentioned. You can get
squirmy bugs like those found in the remake of King Kong. Or you can
get over-the-top bugs like those found in Starship Troopers. Here
they are neither. How, why and what they are doing isn't really important in
a film like this. It helps to have some background information but you know
what you're getting here so it's pointless trying to explain them and giving
us more reason to nitpick. Arguably the worst-looking things of the whole
film here are the sets. We find out that, in a convenient state of affairs,
the power to the mine still works so everything is lit up. However the sets
are too well lit and it's like walking in the daylight sun at times.
Whatever happened to underground caves being pitch black? You never get the
feeling they're trapped underground - simply trapped in a second-rate set.
Hell even The Cave managed to create some decent tension with it's
dark, damp sets. If you're going to have your film set in an old mine, at
least make it look and sound like an old mine. There are a few rickety
wooden boards but this looks like it was only closed yesterday, not 50 years
or whatever it's supposed to be. Creativity is non-existent here. On the
positive side, the film does get quite gruesome at times. There are
characters sliced in two and having their insides ripped out. At least it
gets marks for the gore. Quite what Colm Meaney is doing here is anyone's guess. The
man is a decent actor who built himself a name on Star Trek and has
found solid supporting work for a long time in lots of British and Irish
films. Watching him here was pretty painful. It's clear he isn't really
bothered about the film and you feel relief when his character is eliminated
midway through. I wasn't familiar with the work of Christopher Atkins before
I sat down but after watching him, it's clear that I never want to see him
in a film again. Checking up on IMDB, he was the boy in The Blue Lagoon
and has also starred in an episode of the adult TV series, The Red Shoe
Diaries. The bad guys all snarl and blur into one caricature, with David
Palffy being the worst of the bunch with his "Bad Guys for Dummies"
impression. One of the cast did catch my eye and that was Monica Dean as the
hot French chick but that's not to do with her acting ability (she was
actually pretty likeable in it anyway). It was simply because she was hot.
Verdict
The commercial asks "What's the only thing worse than
being trapped inside a cave with huge bugs?" My answer: watching Caved
In: Prehistoric Terror. I think someone was warning us ahead of time.
