Search - The Thing Below on DVD

Really Bad-but fun to laugh at

Mark Butler | Antioch, Ca USA | 12/05/2005

(1 out of 5 stars)

"This movie is really bad - so bad it descends into the "have fun while laughing at it" type - which is what we did.

The storyline has some promise. Secret government drilling, "something" picked up from deep underground, a gigantic storm that isolates everyone....but it is so full of holes you could drive a truck through it: the "thing" is supposedly so radioactive it will kill people in 10 seconds yet in all the encounters nobody ever has any radiation problems. The thing is from 24 miles down yet is unpressurized, etc. and nothing is done with the story other than to use it as an excuse for a series of random visions, including an extended scene of a stripper. There was no mention of why it bothered if it had all the powers demonstrated later in the movie.. but hey, with a movie like this why ask for a plot that makes sense.

I thought the actors did a servicable job, but then I am very forgiving and others may say it was horrible..it was pretty obvious that their ability to portray being eaten by the tentacles that would be poorly matted in later was not up to the task.

And lets talk about the special effects.. these were the absolute worst in any movie I have seen in the last 20 years. The tentacles look like Monty Python paper cutouts - literally! I've seen better special effects in lego-movies. It was unbelievable, we were simply stunned when they came on the screen. The drill rig was one scene, thats right, one picture that was re-referenced throughout the movie, plus a couple of generic hallways.

The deaths were handled off screen, except for a couple of bad "tentacle-through-the-mouth" effects and there really wasn't any blood and gore so I guess this would be classified more as a suspense than a horror except we were not in suspense, we were laughing at the special effects, dialog and plot holes.

I could go on, from the "General" in his business suit in a an empty room sitting at a card table with a laptop, to the tugboat captain that uses a shotgun to sever his towcable, to the obligatory unexplainable horror ending, this is one of those movies that is so bad its worth watching if your in the right mood. If you have run out of MST3K movies to laugh at and want to get a group of people around and have fun thats what this movie is good for."

STICK WITH MOVIES LIKE "THE THING"

Michael Butts | Martinsburg, WV USA | 10/05/2005

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Another one of those CGI generated movies that is ultimately silly and about as scary as a pile of pups. THE THING BELOW has little coherence in its confusing plot; the effects are pretty cheesy considering what we have to work with these days and the actors are mired in a script that has no sense of suspense or terror. Viewers are never really told what this creature really is or how it manages to infiltrate the thought processes and create hallucinatory images. Further proof that they just don't know how to make a good horror flick these days. Stick with John Carpenter's THE THING if you want a good scare for Halloween!"