Underground - Tödliche Bestien

Typical horror/survival movie, a bunch of young folk trapped in an underground army base, facing zombie like creatures, with super human powers. This "Sitting Duck " cast is an attractive lot. But they are void of any real acting skills and the script is no help what so ever. Of course they wander through darkness, argue with one another and no horror movie would be complete without the "Hey! Lets Split Up" routine, that never works in any fright film. Now the good news is, the movie is made very well and there are some interesting moments and very professional camera work. So Underground turns out to be a cut above ground, give it a watch. It reminded me a bit of "Descent" only not half as good.

A typical horror/action film that undercuts the budget and repels the audience by it's lack of direction. A group of young adults attend a rave, get chased into the underground and realize it is a Army bunker with only two ways out. What they don not see it that they are not alone.

The lighting and editing are very poorly done in this film, the storyboard very loose and unoriginal. NO outstanding performances, in fact most if not all seemed pushed and phoned in. I think the best part was the humanized creatures. The film had potential but quickly falls off pace. A misery of a 3 out of 10

Neil Marshall's THE DESCENT was a fine stab at a survival horror yarn, featuring some excellent locations (those dank and dismal caves were a perfect backdrop for the scares) and a race of nasty villains who seemed to be descended from Gollum. UNDERGROUND is a cheap and nasty American version of the above, with the setting swapped to an underground military bunker.

Unfortunately, UNDERGROUND has much in common with modern-day B-movies as it's the kind of film you watch and mildly enjoy in places, but soon forget about once the credits roll. The script and production values of this film are poor, with much of the running time consisting of too much repetitive wandering around in semi-darkness. Needless to say the characters are bland and undistinguished, with nobody to root for.

The monsters in the film are passable, and I enjoyed the couple of fight scenes that we get here and there (the choreography isn't too shabby). As with many B-movies, the gore content is ramped up to compensate for failings elsewhere, and there are a couple of great gags involving eyeball violence and a twist on the old "ripped in half" joke. Sadly, the film as a whole is just too dark and bland to be worth watching, though.

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.