Mark Reviews Movies: THE DEVIL BELOW

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | March 4, 2021

The Devil Below takes a while to get started, gives us some cheap attempts at horror and thrills, and ends without seeming to do much at all. It's overly familiar, too, so the movie isn't even interesting in what it tries to do.

The premise involves mysterious coal fires, particularly one that appears to have taken a small town off the map. Arianne (Alicia Sanz), a vaguely bad-ass adventurer, has been hired to accompany a team of scientific researchers to the seemingly disappeared town.

The team is made up of geology professor Darren (Adan Canto), who thinks there's a scientific explanation for the fires, and Shawn (Chinaza Uche), another professor, who believes there might be supernatural forces at play. Tech whiz Terry (Jonathan Sadowski) and security expert Jamie (Zach Avery) are there, too. Aside from a brief debate between the professors, screenwriters Stefan Jaworski and Eric Scherbarth don't offer these characters anything beyond their job descriptions.

After finding and opening up the abandoned mine, the team starts being taken away or killed off one at a time. To help add to the body count, the town locals, led by Paul (Will Patton) are still around, trying to contain whatever creatures—demonic or natural—are living down there.

As for the creatures themselves, they're mostly kept off-screen or obscured by a variety of tricks of framing, night-vision, or very dark cinematography. This leads to the characters doing a lot of yelling, falling down, and being roughly dragged away by vague threats under imprecise circumstances. We're in no way attached to these characters, at least.

Once we get a good look at the monsters (as the survivors explore some surprisingly well-lit caverns), we realize director Bradley Parker probably made the right decision. The main creatures here look a lot like actors in unconvincing rubber suits.

The budget, apparently, went toward the story's big computer-generated creature, which feeds on paralyzed victims (who are capable of completely overcoming the condition simply by sheer force of narrative necessity, apparently), offered up as a sacrifice by wobbly monsters, through its snake-like gullet. Some of this might have been unintentionally funny, if the entire affair weren't so dull.

Dull it is, though—and predictable, shallow, and absent of any tension, thrills, or scares to boot. The Devil Below isn't just made on the cheap. It's cheaply plotted and implemented, too.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products