It the late sepia-tinted 1940s, workers at a salt mine want to quit (as it is quitting time) but the foreman wants them to open up a tunnel first. The tunnel is closed by well-placed rubble of rocks like one would find in a Looney Tunes cartoon. A fight erupts because they don’t realize a light touch is enough to make the styrofoam rocks tumble down, giving them access to a room filled with those stars kids used to put on their bedroom ceiling.
And giant Sega Dreamcast CGI beetles that attack and kill everyone.
A perfect set up for a family drama involving a bunch of Slavic gangsters wanting precious ores from said mine. The family dad takes the gangsters down the insanely well lit mine while the family stays in a nearby lake house with the youngest gangster (to great joy of the family’s horny teenage daughter).
Giant beetles, bad CGI, bad green screen, random slo-mo and treachery ensue.
As the film meanders on more questions erupt than answers. Like do gangsters follow treasure maps from mentally handicapped family members? Why was the son this dumb? How did the gangster get actual laser weapons? How were the beetles getting enough oxygen to be so massive in deep caves that were obviously barren? Who has been replacing the lightbulbs in the insane amount of light sources in this cave nobody has visited for 60 years?
Was it the beetles?
The film stars famous Irish/Star Trek actor Colm Meaney, who is obviously very exited to be in it, and Christopher Atkins, who is most famous for being non-Brooke Shields in “The Blue Lagoon.” Colm is a fantastic actor and that is something one can’t say about the other actors in the flick.
I love a good animal attack film, but “Caved In,” aka “Caved In: Prehistoric Terror,“ doesn’t have much going for it. It’s quite dull the first hour and the beetles appear to have been animated at a different frame rate than the rest of the film, giving most scenes with them a sluggish feel which doesn’t help when the CGI is bad to begin with. There are better Sci-Fi channel creature features to watch.
