Once again we have a movie that, after a fairly promising setup, falls back to the ever so popular run of teaching us 101 ways to kill a monster with a bone/axe. The movie uses the human instinct of reacting to sudden changes in the environment to scare you. In other words, a sudden loud noise + quick change in on-screen action = you get scared. The mandatory monster-that-looks-dead-but-isn't-after-all and the usual bunch of expendable cast members (monster food in other words) also have their moment on screen. For experienced(?) adventurers, the girls sometimes show incredibly bad judgment (another horror movie cliché). This is the case for instance when one of the girls thinks she sees daylight and runs(!) towards the light just to fall down a deep shaft. Another instance is when a lead character jumps around a corner and shouts (apparently to scare the possible monster around the corner). This after she has herself figured out that the monsters seem to hunt by tracking sound.
Up until when the first monster is shown, this movie actually had a lot of promise I think. The triangle drama between the two main characters and the husband of one of them surely made for a good (although somewhat cliché) setup for conflicts to be solved deep underground. The gruesome car accident in the beginning also added some very good premises to the mix. I would have liked to see a movie that would deal with the psychological stress of being trapped underground and how this affects the group dynamics and the individuals. No monsters would have been needed, just something to trigger the imagination of the audience. The potential to create something scaring without ever showing a monster was there, which I think is well illustrated by the scene where one of the girls gets herself trapped in a transfer tunnel and starts panicking (the best scene in the movie imo).
Overall, as far as gore goes this movie delivers. I would not call it particularly scaring though, since after the monsters are shown it's more or less a slaughter fest, nothing more. Kudos for creating a believable claustrophobic cave environment (at least the first half of the film. In the second half, the fact that they're actually in a cave seems to be of less importance). Good sound design also. But in the end this is just another gore movie in the line of many.
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