BENEATH - THE HALLOWEEN HORRORS COLLECTION

By Guest Reviewer The Creepy Concierge 

Sweaty vests, dirt, a gutsy young women trapped in the oppressive darkness? Sounds a lot like a horror movie and in turn a lot like Beneath.

Shades of The Descent here and, oddly at times, Alien too in this subterranean horror-adventure-thriller mash-up. Samantha (Kelly Noonan – Haunt) finds herself at the mercy of…. well, I won’t spoil the surprise when she and a group of colleagues get trapped 600 feet below ground beneath a collapsing mine. Mayhem, madness and malevolence ensue, all played out in the dank and drain-like environment of the last place anyone would really choose to be unless they had to.  Easily dismissed as a clone of higher profile ‘claustrophobia’ movies BENEATH (2013) directed by Ben Ketai (StartUp and Quantum Break) still manages to stand on its own two feet despite wearing its influences on its sleeve a little too often. It’s a fun and very tense watch though, and it feels like a ‘movie’ movie despite getting under the dirty fingernails of some fairly serious themes - isolation, stress and mental unmooring among them. 

Technically it’s great. The production looks and sounds fantastic. All department heads clearly had a goal and executed their ambitions to the best of their ability with the middling budget at hand.  There are no papier-mache cave walls on display here. It drips and seethes into the subconscious and stays there until you feel you are one of the unlucky miners who’ve found themselves in this unfortunate and terrifying predicament. If hell does have a tenth circle it might look a lot like this.

Performances are front and centre and exactly as you’d expect them to be in this type of picture though there is some subtle work on display here too. Every player commits in one way or another and unlike lesser entries in the ‘trapped’ sub-genre every character feels necessary. But ultimately it’s Noonan’s film, as it should be, and she rocks the vest hard, if you’ll pardon the pun, and should really get her place in the pantheon of horror heroines. Is it a great picture? No, but really what is? Is it a good picture? Yes, yes it is, and it exceeded this reviewer’s expectations, and I’m glad I took the journey below. If you really want to see THE DESCENT part 3, which you can’t, you could do worse than give BENEATH a spin. Oh, and yes, for avoidance of doubt, the camera shakes and there are a lot of flashlights. And Jeff Fahey (The Lawnmower Man) is in it too. And really, people, who can resist a bit of Jeff Fahey every now and again?

Watch for free here: BENEATH on W4FREE