MY CALL: This… was just okay. Some great gore gags and well-paced action, but a lot of redundancy and everything in-between kept me from enjoying this as much as I’d like. But oh, how I’ll remember the good gore gags. MORE MOVIES LIKE Underground: For more troglodytes behaving badly, go for Creep (2004), The Descent (2005) and Indigenous (2014).
After a brawl at a rave gets way out of hand, a group of friends find themselves trapped in the long-abandoned military bunker that now serves as the site of their improvised night club. Now trapped and locked in, they must find a way out. Just one problem… this is another subterranean gore factory filled with flesh-eating Morlocks a la The Descent (2005). In fact, they’re also a lot like the mutant from Creep (2004).
Our trapped ravers include Jenna (Christine Evangelista; Fear the Walking Dead, All Hallows’ Eve), Evie (Hayley Goldstein; Escape Room), Matt (Ross Thomas; The Haunting of Molly Hartley), Storm (Adrian R’Mante), Eric (Jeff D’Agostino), Mira (Sofia Pernas; Indigenous), Billy (Adam Meirick) and Dora (Megan Hensley; The Crazies, Chupacabra Territory, The Haunting of Alice D).
Our slack-jawed, jagged-mawed, subterranean troglodytes break through walls, rip off ears, growl, snarl and scamper about in the darkness. Every now and then they grab or drag a victim through the pipes and tear off a head or flay the flesh off a face. The monstrous creepers look pretty decent in focused shots, but the action gets a little clunky… even to the point of silly degrees of gravity-defiant stunts. Whatever, it’s a horror movie, right? It gets a pass.
Our victims hypothesize military cross-breeding experiments are the probable origin of these apparently amphibious alligator people. These troglodytes may look almost like beastly zombies, but they are organized and tactful. And as if we hadn’t seen it time and time again in Wrong Turn (2003) and the like, these creatures collect and sort the sundries of their victims into menageries of dog tags and piles of shoes. But we shouldn’t poke holes in the writing—otherwise, why even watch this? The writing is just capable enough to move us through the running time as each victim is plucked from the group and ripped apart. After all, who cares that in the first act these were skulking crawling monsters of the shadows and by the third act they were running and brawling like drunks in a barfight?
I’m hesitant to call this good, and wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend it. But it’s really not so bad, and it’s certainly entertaining (most of the time). The action is well-paced, although I did start to find the redundant style of horror action a bit tired in the third act of the movie. Still, there were some highlights (like the screen grabs that lured me to watch this in the first place). Credit where it’s due—some of the greatest gore gags are in the last ten minutes, including someone humorously missing their lower body, a brutal jaw slash, and an outstanding eye gouge gag you’d expect from an 80s Fulci zombie film. Director Rafael Eisenman (Red Shoe Diaries) did okay, I guess.