Perigo na Montanha

I just finished watching this movie and I must admit I didn't have high hopes. To my pleasant surprise this turned out to be a quite good movie. It wasn't a great movie, but I am very glad I got to watch it! During a test of a low frequency transmitter two men and the transmitter disappear. A team is gathered to search the caves where the test took place. Caves that never before have been explored by man. But, what waits them below they could never imagine.

This story turns out quite original and I think that is maybe what makes the movie so good. The script is far from perfect, but it works. The acting is probably the best with the whole movie. It is generally good. The cinematography could, however, been better. I find it too boring. It's too straight. Though they did a pretty good job in creating the atmosphere and the mood. There were some pretty chilling sequences.

When it comes to effects what can you expect from a 1984 B-movie? Well, they did OK on most of it, except for the monster. It was actually pretty bad and in fact personally I think they should have cut the whole monster. They way I see it, it rather took then give anything to the movie.

I can recommend this movie because of it's story. There are few cliché there. As for the rest of this movie it is OK, but nothing out of the ordinary. However, well worth to watch.

Rupert 'Wolf' Wolfsen works for the US government, he is liaising with the US military in central America to help find a suitable cave where they wish to instigate a new top secret radio device for submarines?. They have trouble finding such a location until after a large landslide an entrance to just such a cave reveals itself. After setting up their equipment, they retire to base camp only to find that when they return the next morning, their irreplaceable transmitter has been taken and the guards dead. A search and rescue mission is authorised to go into the furthest reaches of the cave. Preposterous premise aside this was rather good fun, What Waits Below can only be described as a cross between Marshall's The Descent and Universals The Mole People, right down to the latter's albino civilisation who live there. Don Sharp just about retains an air of quality to proceedings, there may even be some pseudo political message in the ending.

The US military is running a test for a special type of radio transmitter in some caves in Nicaragua.When the signal from one of the transmitters suddenly disappears a team of soldiers,scientists and cave-specialists is sent to the cave to find what really happened.But the cave is not safe.It seems that a tribe of lemurian albino cave-dwellers lives there,who stalks its prey by their body heat."What Waits Below" is an overlooked horror movie,which obviously influenced Neil Marshall's 2005 horror hit "The Descent".Pretty creepy and entertaining horror flick with some suspense and effective scares.The action is fast and the infra-red stalking is a nice touch.7 out of 10.

My review was written in June 1986 after watching the film on Lightning video cassette.

"What Waits Below" is a dull rendering of a lost race fantasy yarn. Filmed in 1983 under the title "Secrets of the Phantom Caverns", picture received only a test release in November 1984, subsequently appearing in video stores.

Robert Powell to;ines as Wolfson ("call me Wolf"), a soldier of fortune, first encountered being chased around Nicaragua by enemy troops. He's recruited by military pal George (A. D. Weary) to go to Belize and help U. S. Army Major Stevens (Timothy Bottoms) make the Omega Station there operational (transmitting signals to aid submarines in navigation).

Near the Omega base, a team of anthropologists is exploring caves and being bossed around by Major Stevens. Seismic tests by the army force an opening in the rocks and soon thereafter, army guards are killed and the Omega transmitter is stolen.

Stevens, Wolfson and the scientists search the new cave and find a lost race of fabled Lemurians, styled here as albinos. The Lemurains stole the transmitter because its high frequencey signal was bothering their sensitive hearing. In warring with this lost race, many casualties occur until Wolfson finally escapes and orders the caves sealed off permanently, to leave the Lemurians in peace.

Extremely tame, "What Waits Below" meanders around below ground without the expected action-adventure excitement. Except for a huge snake head that attacks in one scene, it is minus the monsters that could have made this a fun picture for kids.

An impressive cast is wasted, with most of the attention resting on vast caverns (filmed in Alabama and Tennessee locations), augmented by okay mattework and miniatures.

I had to principal reasons to check out the relatively obscure 80's cave-horror movie. First of all because I read in several reviews that the film can be considered as an antecedent of Neil Marshall's acclaimed 2005 hit "The Descent", in which a bunch of extreme sport chicks encounter a strange breed of predators in a previously unexplored cave. The second reason is because this was the last meaningful film of Don Sharp. This underrated Australian-born director made a few very cool movies for Hammer studios, like "Kiss of the Vampire" and "Rasputin: The Mad Monk", as well as a few other sadly overlooked genre gems like "Dark Places" and "Psychomania" (about a gang of zombie bikers!). "What Waits Below" has a peculiar but potentially interesting premise, and dark ominous caves have always been effective settings for horror flicks. Whenever a group of teenagers, scientists or speleologists plummets down a cavern, there's always some type of monster or estranged civilization to knock them off. The problem here, however, is that takes an enormous long time before something happens and when the menace does eventually gets personified, you'll only feel underwhelmed and maybe even tempted to chuckle. Robert Powell, who starred in some bizarre horror films before like "The Survivor" and "Harlequin", plays a caving expert hired by the army to install a radio transmitter inside a Central American cave. I think it was to remain in contact with submarines, or something… I didn't quite understand that part. Anyway, not important, because the radio as well as the soldiers on guard mysteriously vanish during the first night and Powell leads an expedition deeper down into the cavern. Plentiful of dull conversations and false scares later, the group stumbles upon a whole community of albino dorks. The cave people seriously don't look the least bit scary. Earlier in the film, there' a confusing sequence with some sort of snake monster that peeps out of a hole in the stone wall and kills off one of the soldiers. Even though that creature is a lot more horrific – albeit also a bit cheesy and typically 80's – it would have been a better idea to revolve the film on. Don Sharp generates a bit of morbid atmosphere in the beginning of the descent, but it quickly becomes tedious and too enticing to fast forward. Still, good performances by Lisa Blount and Timothy Bottoms as the despicable army superior.