The Cave: Critic Reviews

Fright-wise, The Cave is a dry hole.

The first-time director Bruce Hunt is no stranger to inspired and stylish productions, but his horror-action film fails to inject new life into tired territory.

'Something's not right here,' proclaims one of the characters exploring the creepy depths of The Cave. We couldn't have said it better ourselves.

The Cave isn't just a bad movie, it's a very, very, very bad movie, so bad that it can't even redeem itself by turning into high camp.

The Cave answers every question I've ever had about what might happen when a handful of hotties head deep inside the earth. For starters, the middle-aged and intelligent die early.

Spare and single-minded, The Cave is an insistently entertaining piece of pulp.

The makers of The Cave must have conceived their plot by Googling 'creature features' and 'recipes for monster mash.'

Most everyone in the audience, except those rendered unconscious by boredom, will see the 'big twist' plot turn coming well in advance, although the qualifiers 'big' and 'twist' seem overblown and inexact.

Ten things I learned watching The Cave. 1. 'Beneath heaven lies hell. Beneath hell lies the cave.' 2. Beneath that lies the theater showing The Cave.

Logically, all the monsters would eat all the humans at once, and the movie would be over in about three minutes. In the case of The Cave, that would have been a good thing.

Despite the occasional chuckles of embarrassment for what the cast (including Morris Chestnut, Piper Perabo, and Eddie Cibrian) must endure, The Cave is a dead end.

Feels stunningly familiar as it goes through the rote edicts of the scientific crew vs. toothy beastie formula.

A cheesy, often unintentionally funny, direct-to-video-caliber knockoff of Aliens that couldn't be more shallow.

Why would anybody go in The Cave?

Somewhere deep beneath the Carpathian mountains, something unholy stirs: It's an unspeakable stinker of a movie called The Cave.

The Cave has a brisk B-movie efficiency, and not much space for bad acting, but it is blatantly derivative -- Alien or Predator in a cave.

A bottomless pit of lame characters, horror-film cliches and improbable monsters.

Replete with winged undersea cave monsters, unlikely mountain climbing heroics and a mutating microbe that turns its victims into creatures-in-waiting "The Cave" is a paint-by-numbers thriller lacking in pigment.