I just finished watching this low budget Mexican variation on the whole ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’ sub-genre and although it is not a good film I got some joy from it. The story is silly/ludicrous with a group of scientists following up reports of horrible monsters in a section of a huge system of caves. A more clueless bunch of people you are rarely going to find. As members of the group are picked off the leader continues to insist on staying to try to reach the ‘Center of the Earth’! How he thought they were ever going to manage that I cannot understand. Since they never got far enough away from the surface to make it impossible to have the dead bodies taken out by paramedics I really don’t think they were getting anywhere lower than, say, the upper layers of the outer crust. But this is not a film about logic or sense! It’s a film about finding winged cave monsters and blowing the living hell out of them. I actually liked the look of the monsters even as the poor guys in the costumes stumbled around the very real caves trying not to trip. They look pretty menacing most of the time.
Sadly the cool close-ups of the monster’s face are done as inserts and these shots do NOT match up well with the other footage. The cave shot footage shows the creature mask as a rigid, stiff affair but the close-ups are of a more articulated and scarier mug. Amusingly, when we are shown the cool monster face you can easily see that these scenes were shot in a room someplace and not a cave. I think I could even spot a painting hanging on the wall! It kind of works for what it is which is a poorly produced kiddie feature perfect for undiscriminating monster fans.
Damn! I think I just described myself!
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