Main cast: Ross Thomas (Matt Wilcox), Sofia Pernas (Mira Antonova), Adrian R’Mante (Storm Johnson), Jeff D’Agostino (Eric Abercrombie), Hayley Knight (Evie Glass), Inbar Lavi (Lillith Trog), and Jack Donner (Gunther)
Director: Rafael Eisenman

Underground is just something I happened to watch on a whim that other day, oh a whim, so I really don’t harbor any preconceived expectations coming into it. Maybe that’s why I’m not that disappointed by this otherwise rather generic “people meet mutated humans” slasher thingy.

The movie opens with some soldiers trying to kill some things in a US military bunker, and that, I feel, is its biggest misstep. This scene reveals the monsters right away, and they look like extras with some cheap-looking rubber mask. Won’t it make the movie more suspenseful if the monsters had been kept hidden from the viewer until some dramatic penultimate moment later in the movie?

The soldiers are all killed, because they have to get the prologue going in the first place, and the movie then cuts to two years later, when for some reason I can’t even begin to fathom, the bunker is now a nightclub. I mean… how? Did the military sell the whole place off to someone to open a club down there? Why would they even do that?

Anyway, I suppose any reason to get the story going is as good as any. So we have Matt and Storm, two person from the Marine Corps that are looking for a good time now that they’re back from Iraq. They bump into Storm’s friend Eric, and Eric has with him two ladies Evie and Lilith. Also joining them is Mira, a doctor that has worked with Matt before and she just happens to be there as well.

So everyone’s going to be happily paired off and be shagging away before the night is over, yes? Well, too bad Storm gets into a fight with some big tough guys, and the six of them end up in a vault, the steel door locked by the irate tough guys. Oh no, they are trapped!

Wait, Matt and Storm realize that they are in a US military bunker, so they tell the others that such bunkers always have another exit. They just have to find it. Calling for help is impossible, because they are underground and there is no signal. Again, why build a club here, when it’s going to be super hard to call for help should any emergency arises?

The six then travel deeper and deeper, where it’s dark and perfect for those mutated humans to hide in and ambush these people for kills and thrills…

Now, the best thing about this movie is Ross Thomas, who is easy on the eyes, running around with his shirt unbuttoned for quite a bit of the last act of this movie.

For the most part, though, this is a pretty unremarkable movie that goes through the motions in delivering a pretty standard flick. Jump scares, women (it’s always the women, sigh) losing their crap and running off into trouble and needing to be rescued, and people getting killed right when genre-savvy audience expect them to be—the whole affair is more predictable than suspenseful.

There is also the predictable sequel baiting final scene, although I doubt a sequel will be coming unless someone needs a way to do some money laundering.

Also, perhaps because of the limited budget, the lighting of this movie is not the best. In fact, there are some really annoyingly dark scenes that make it hard to see clearly what is happening.

At any rate, Underground still has some pretty nice kills, and it’s standard and generic enough to be something that can be watched with the brain turned off. It’s not bad enough to warrant fleeing the other direction, and it’s not great enough to be a must-watch. It’s somewhere in the middle—a decent time-waster when one wants to watch something just to pass the time and there’s nothing better to do.