The Cavern (DVD)

What if your loved one's life depended on you, and you failed her? That's the demon which plagues experienced spelunker, Gannon (Mustafa Shakir), but he's soldiering on, leading yet another expedition. Still, images of his hand slipping from his doomed girlfriend's grip haunt his mind… will he lose anyone this time?

Since The Cavern is a horror movie, the answer is a resounding 'Yes!' Gannon's going to lose a whole lot of people this time. At least they can't ask for a refund. The characters are pretty much interchangeable, merely there to serve as fodder for the cave-beast.

After an extremely static, talky beginning, the group of eight intrepid explorers pick up their gear and head for the nearest, most dangerous (and, previously-unexplored, of course) underground labyrinth of deep, dark caves. As they go deeper and deeper, they chatty group continues to talk. And talk. And talk.

Finally, someone dies. Not to be happy about something like that, but it's one less mouth to spout boring, stilted dialogue. The death scenes are gory, but they're executed without one iota of suspense.

Having recently seen The Cave and The Descent, I found The Cavern to be barely watchable. Not only is it a tedious story with a ridiculous resolution, but the visuals are beyond abysmal. The shaky-cam is over-used to the point of setting off an extreme Dramamine-level emergency – that is, when you can actually see anything. Too much of the time,  the lazy filmmakers decided to just go to black and rely on voice and sound to pick up the slack. I understand there are times you might want to audience to feel disoriented, but to not allow the viewer (viewer being the operative word here) to see anything is just unconscionable. We are making MOVIES here folks, not audio books.

However… if you were a willing recipient of the Primal Scream therapy back in the 70s, and you are a big Blair Witch Project fan, you just might find a reason to step into The Cavern. The rest of us will be watching The Descent again.

The DVD boasts a surprising number of extras, given the low budget and no-stars obscurity of The Cavern. First time feature writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi enjoys an enthusiastic commentary that blithely ignores any of the film's inherent problems, but does rightly praise the acting ability of the ensemble casts and appreciates the crew's hard work.

Within the Cavern - A Video Journal: This is a reasonably entertaining if overly-long and rambling look at what it was like to make the film.

Caverns of the Mojave - An Expedition with Real Cavers: This featurette follows real-life cavers on an expedition deep below the earth's surface. Boring to me, but might be of interest to aspiring spelunkers.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson