WITHIN

A group of speleologists decide to venture into a network of caves never explored by man in the heart of Kazakhstan, followed by a writer who will document everything with an account that could become a best-seller. But as soon as the boys set foot among the rocks, something traps them down there, obstructing the passage they entered and cutting off their contact with the outside world: now the only goal is to survive the creature that lurks in the caves. It's shocking to see so much incompetence behind "The Cavern," another bad product that distributors have reserved for our market directly for home video. The debutante with the obscure name Olatunde Osunsanmi handles the film 360° by writing it, editing it, directing it, and producing it, the problem is that he doesn't do any of the tasks he has assigned himself well! "The Cavern" is a shameless imitation work that loosely follows "The Descent – Descent into Darkness" and "The Devil's Hideout," both from 2005, a year that also belongs to Osunsanmi's film. But the mystery about the contemporaneity of the works is soon revealed: when a production company announces a film that is expected to be a commercial success, there's always someone who rushes to preventive emulation, taking the basic elements of the already known plot, similar locations, and a title that somehow recalls the mainstream work; in this case, "The Cavern" was probably born as a poor clone of "The Devil's Hideout," which in the original is significantly titled "The Cave" (note that both were later distributed by Sony Pictures). But let's return to the beautiful mess made by Osunsanmi. "The Cavern" brings together all, but really all, the elements we have already seen presented quite convincingly in the films that are contemporary to it, the problem is that the script fails to blend everything and does not develop anything properly. The characters are uninspired and not characterized at all, puppets in the hands of fate, ready to exit the scene without the viewer caring about anything; the only one of them on whom a minimal psychological construction is attempted is the group leader, a stereotypical and unexpressive Mustafa Shakir (the TV series "Dr. House" and "Cold Case") with a boring trauma in his past. For the rest, they don't even try to give the others a personality, but throw in some arguments and some regrets just to stretch the broth. The dialogues are the apotheosis of the cliché and the "I really don't know what to make them say," with little phrases taken at random from any edition of the TV "Big Brother." Osunsanmi shows that he mainly knows television and his direction appears flat and dull like that of American TV shows from the early '90s. His only terrible touch of personality is total confusion: to create noise and pathos, the director shakes the camera from side to side, flips it, blurs it, and the game is done. The result is simply frustrating. If we also add a horribly retouched photography that overcharges the colors to the point of making them annoying to the eye, the damage is complete. It should also be said that the film is made on a budget, with a budget of $150,000, which does not allow for too complex special effects, to the point that the expedient adopted for the "creature" solves some budget problems but also appears highly illogical for the coherence of the story. Forewarned…