Contender for Worst Cover Ever.

Title card:  “The following is inspired by true events. In 2013 a collapse at the Brackett Coal Mine left a group of workers trapped nearly six hundred feet underground.  This is what happened . . . beneath the surface.”

That is a strangely specific and verifiable way to begin a horror film.  If there ever was a Brackett Coal Mine collapse, it must have been suppressed by the government because I’m not finding it.

C’mon guys, have the courtesy to lie to us — like Fox Mulder, we want to believe; it’s OK to lie, just don’t rub our faces in it.

The film opens with search and rescue crew breaking through the rocks.  They see blood on the wall, then a survivor.

Flash back to 4 days ago — Samantha Marsh is recording testimonials praising her father George on her phone.  She has escaped the coal town and is now a big shot lawyer in New York.  She confides in one of the locals that she is an environmental lawyer, and by the reaction, she might as well have said she puts rapists and child molesters back on the streets.

At the local bar, after her father’s farewell party, Samantha is tossing back shots with the good ol’ boys.  To prove she has not lost touch with the coal miners, she offers to go subterranean with them the next day (not a sexual euphemism), thereby guaranteeing 1) a cave-in, 2) attack by strange creatures, 3) or both.

The next morning she joins dad and the crew down in the mine.  The mechanical digger hits a rough patch, but the operator presses on, breaking into a cavern.  Cue the predicted cave-in.  Not that that’s a bad thing — it’s pretty much what you come to a mining thriller to see, as long as it is done well.

The effects are not spectacular, but they get the job done.  I had never thought about the effect of the air being compressed in a cave-in, but here it blows a man across the shaft like a rag doll.  Good creative stuff.

The survivors retreat into a rescue pod that can provide fresh air and water for the 72 hours it will take for them be be rescued.  It isn’t long before they hear noise and go outside the pod to see if maybe one of their crew is still alive in the mine.

It is understandable that they would want to help their buddies.  But it seems like they are too quick to go into fear mode — and not fear of additional cave-ins, but of something in the mine.

The story meanders a little as the miners try to survive the lack of oxygen, and the changes that their pals start experiencing.  It is effective, actually giving me chills a number of times.

The performances are generally good with one exception.  The always fun Jeff Fahey (Lost) is good as George, there is a nice assortment of earthy miners, and Joey Kern is good in the Corporal Hicks role. Unfortunately,  Kelly Noonan is no Ellen Ripley.  I just never bought her performance either above ground or below.  Even the look of her character was off-putting.  The braided hair just looked ridiculous on her.  Also, her blindingly white smile was almost comical, especially the contrast after she gets dirtied up with coal dust.

Overall, a nice little thriller, though.

Post-Post:

• Joey Kern also went overboard with the veneers, but it is less jarring than the fluorescent Joe Bidenesque choppers of Kelly Noonan..
• There is apparently some tension between Samantha and her Mom, but is a useless thread that is laid out and serves absolutely no purpose.  It would have been better if her Mom were dead and she had the conflict with her only remaining parent.

Another contender for worst cover ever.

There is just something that works for me in underground movies.  Not underground movies, but movies that are actually set largely underground.

There is no need to justify loving a great film like The Descent; but liking The Descent 2 goes a long way toward proving my point.  It doesn’t matter why the people are underground.  It could be caves like The Cave or Sanctum.  Could be really deep like The Core or really shallow like Buried.  Could be subways like Creep or End of the Line.  Could be mines like My Bloody Valentine or today’s subject.  Like putting putting people in a spaceship, putting people in danger underground is always a great premise.

That said, the actual start to this film is not great.  It begins in a flash-forward with an annoying voice-over and a mine set which struck me as cheesy (although not so much when the action actually got there).  There is an effective quick scene where we hear a crying woman trapped behind a barred door trying to claw her way out, then we cut to Michael who lost me with his first line of dialogue.

There is just something not comfortable about him and I don’t think it is his character.  In his chat with girlfriend Briana Evigan, I sense zero relationship there.  She mentions his meds which we learn are to combat schizophrenia, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem either.  This is not a couple.

They are getting supplies at a convenience store.  Beside the door is strange item — some sort of board that advertises the Washington Tribune’s story of “Couple Found Murdered in RV.”  Has a newspaper gone to that much effort since the Titanic sank? This board should have been worn by a street-urchin hawking newspapers in 1912, I tells ya.  Second — caution, time loops ahead — I can’t decide whether it makes sense that the deaths are being referenced yet.

They arrive at the woodsy cabin of the soon-to-be dead Matt and Sarah which appears to be about 10,000 square feet.

The group consists of Lex, with the mug, disposition and wit of a soccer hooligan; Guy, the very stiff grand-son of Gregory Peck and amazing doppelganger of Benedict Cumberbatch; Michael, the wispy, solid-as-Jello schizophrenic; and TJ,  whose main characteristic is that he is not one of the other three guys.

With them are Rose, who has psychic flashes; Claire, the cute one; and Lyla, Michael’s unlikely girlfriend played by Briana Evigan.

The gang finds an abandoned mine near the cabin and ignores the warnings not to enter.  After doing a little exploration, they go back to the cabin.

The most odious member of the group, Lex, claims he dropped his wallet, so he and TJ take a 2nd trip to the mine.  There, they discover two dead corpses of themselves. They go back to the cabin and tell the group what they saw.

Guy doesn’t believe them, so they make a 3rd trip to the mine in the same day.  For a change in a horror movies, the bodies are still there, and everyone agrees they are in trouble.

Naturally, the solution is to take a 4th trip to the mine.  This time, behind the barred door seen in the opening, they find another body — this time alive, and more importantly, cute — Claire.  As they already have a Claire in the cabin, they leave her and return to the cabin.

Michael is acting very creepy, so they decide to exile him from the cabin. But where to go?  Hmmmmm . . . . so we get the 5th trip to the mine today where he is locked in a room, sadly for him not the same one as Claire.

After they return to the cabin, Rose has another psychic flash saying that Michael has escaped.  So they make the 6th trip to the mine that day.

There are time-loops, are-we-already-dead conversations, psychic flashes, nice callbacks to earlier events, people meeting themselves, and the very clever use of a particular note.

There are a couple of wildcards thrown in to provide alternative explanations, at least briefly, for the strange happenings.  The use of mushrooms to explain Rose’s psychic flashes is clever.  There is also an aurora borealis which is never really connected to the story, but does linger mysteriously over the proceedings.  However, I never got the sense that Michael’s illness was the root of his craziness, and I found it to be mostly a distraction.

This is in the same vein (ha, mining humor!) as Triangle and Timecrimes, an enjoyable time — and mind — bender.  The only weakness for me was the actor playing Michael, and unfortunately he is in far more scenes than the other actors.

Post-Post:

• It took 4 writers and 12 producers to make this.
• “You brought a rolling suitcase on a camping trip”