Underground - Tödliche Bestien

"Underground" had potential to be great, but it never made it above less than mediocrity, sadly enough. Why? Well because of the lack of lighting. Now, I know that it was taking place in an underground bunker, but most of the scenes were so dark that it was hard to get a view of what was going on. Sure, it added to the realism of the lack of light far underneath the ground, but as a viewer of a movie, I would like to see what was going on. I didn't pay money to just sit around and look at poor-lit images all through an entire movie.

The story in "Underground" is the American government has been conducting secret experiments underground, gee - haven't we seen that before? And get this, of course there had to be some reference to notorious Dr. Mengele from World War II - just to add some diabolic twist to the storyline. Anyway, a bunch of young people are attending a rave at an abandoned military base - yep, you guessed it - the exact same military base where the government were conducting these inhuman experiments. After running afoul with gang-bangers, the people get trapped underground. But they aren't alone, they are being stalked by the genetically altered hybrids of man-beasts.

"Underground" had potential to be much more than it turned out to be. Don't get me wrong, the storyline - although cheesy and been seen numerous times before - wasn't all that bad. The storyline worked out well enough, and there was a great sense of claustrophobia and paranoia in the movie. But the complete lack of proper lighting really made the movie unbearable to sit through. Which was a shame.

As for the effects in the movie, well they were actually alright, and this subspecies of genetically altered humans were looking great. They did have that ferocious beastly quality to them. Just a shame they were mostly kept in the shadows or near-complete darkness most of the time.

"Underground" had a great ensemble of actors and actresses who did put on good performances. I think the only one I recognized in this movie was Jack Donner (playing Gunther). So it was nice to have a horror movie with a cast of fresh, new faces for a change.

Despite having potential, "Underground" never really kicked it off for me, because the lack of lighting really brought down the enjoyment of the movie. This style of keeping everything, and I do mean everything, in darkness is so early 1980's horror movie. It worked nicely back in the day, but today we want to see the dread and horror stalking us beneath the surface of the ground.

Some of the comments here are just a tad bit too good for this movie, as it really does suck and will bore anyone out of their mind, if not get him quite mad because it lacks the basic logic also! You could say that indeed it is some sort of breed between The Descent and The Cave, probably & Creep also, but I think that Underground only got the bad parts from them.

Seriously, this is one of them very bad movies, even the camera work is terrible, as you will see it shaking from time to time, the characters are not so bad OK, but the plot, well we really have a problem here! Cheesy cheesy, cliché, cliché and you can always tell when someone else is going to die! As for the creatures, when you'll hear the explanation for them, you'll probably start laughing, only good part of the movie to be honest.

Bottom line, do try The Descent, The Cave, Creep even Stag Night, but stay awaaaaay from this one! I gave it a 3! Solid 3!

Being in the "biz" it was more or less evident to me that this film was unfinished and it's a shame that it was released this way since it had the potential to be a decent B horror flick.

Aside from some unremarkable acting (which is excusable when dealing with low budget horrors) the score and cinematography were competently executed. Make-up and special effects were decent aside from one horrendous CGI shot of snow. Where we get into trouble is in the edit.

An unforgivable number of scenes were disjointed and leaves the audience wondering "what is going on," "where am I now" or "who am I looking at?" I've seen such scenes before in what we call an assembly or rough cut. This is when the editor takes his/her first stab at a complete edit. It's usually after this that the production team gets a clear idea of what scenes need to be re-shot or what extra shots are needed to make the edit work or flow.

For whatever reason (lack of funding, actor availability, location no longer available, etc.) this was clearly not done which makes the film extremely frustrating to follow.

I recommend staying clear of this one. I'm a huge fan of horror films but I ended up fast forwarding the last 10 minutes just to get to the end because my brain got tired of trying to fill in the gaps.

It's your usual 'young people get trapped (this time underground) and have to fight for their lives against mutants' movie.

It's all very much in the Wrong Turn vein. You know, the cast are good looking. There are lots of pretty, short-skirted females screaming the place down. The guys run around all tough and are, funnily enough, the easiest slain.

But underground it's dark, and thus we're often faced with a too dark picture. Half the time I couldn't see what was going on.

The ending couldn't have come quick enough as I was becoming increasingly bored with this movie. It's 'b' rated stuff, nothing special.

4/10.

I'll make this very short & easy: don't waste your precious time watching this atrocity. It's a complete insult to the senses.

Photography in this film is horrible. Acting is laughable. Music is bad. FX are mostly C grade, especially makeup & CGI (practical ones are kinda OK though). There's way better editing on an average YouTube video. And the acting is bad, bad, bad. Oh, did I already said that? Well...that's how bad it is.

But by far the worst offender here is the script. Some truly ghastly experiments created some really nasty creatures. So the movie starts with a really lame "search & destroy" military operation going bad. 2 years later the site is home of a rave party (!) and a group of friends end up trapped underground. 2 yrs? 2 yrs!? That's it? So the government sends a black ops team to an underground military bunker and everyone dies. So naturally that's it. Game over. Let's just forget everything about that place and keep going. No "hey, maybe we should go and check if someone got out of there alive" or something? Nah. The creatures we wanted dead will probably die of old age. Why bother, right? And that's only the beginning. I'm not going to say anything else because I don't wanna spoil "the fun" for any masochist out there, willing to waste 80+ minutes watching this thing. But you have characters doing the most dumb and unreasonable things. A couple of veteran soldiers that display no real knowledge of military tactics or anything useful whatsoever, other than telling sad war stories. Characters pulling "facts" and knowledge out of thin air, knowing things there's no way they could possibly know. Things happening one minute and other things contradicting the first ones happening on the next minute without any sort of rational explanation. There's even a scene where a guy takes off his shirt and do almost nothing for 3+ minutes just to show his abs (seriously, there's no real reason for it, not even in the scene's context that demands quickness and taking off your clothes will waste very valuable time). And I'm not even going to mention the dreadful & incoherent ending. I've seen bad movies with bad scripts. But this is one of the worst ones. The story here is like something a teenager wrote for a high school essay. I can't believe a professional writer did such an awful job.

This movie has zero redeeming qualities. Not even a couple of one liners or some cool jokes here & there. It's just plain bad. With emphasis on the plain aspect. There's really no reason to watch it. Not even to make fun of it. -1/10