While beloved for creating television programs like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space, as well as the disaster epics The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure and The Swarm, let's not count producer Irwin Allen out when it comes to memorible '70s/'80s telefilms. Allen brought us Fire! and Flood! and, in 1983, he scared the ever-living crap out of a very young Jordan Hoffman with his ante-penultimate work Cave-In!
Cave In! starred Leslie Nielson, Ray Milland and a number of screaming blonde women facing mortality when a good-natured spelunking trip goes south. Ever since that night, when my parents should have been keeping a better eye on me, I've had a deathly fear of caves. Luckily they are easy to avoid.
However, the James Cameron-produced 3D movie Sanctum directed by the Australian Alister Grierson brought me right back that memorible night..
The picture starts out in classic exploitation picture fashion - simple characters with clearly defined alliances. There's a rich guy funding research at the "mother of all caves" in Papua/New Guinea and his adventure-loving hottie girlfriend. There's the team leader, a gruff, emotionless (but brilliant!) explorer and his estranged son. And there's also the spelunking version of Redshirts.
After some soap opera yelling and some shots of the majesty of nature, we finally get to what we've been waiting for. Problems! A huge storm arrives sooner than expected and it makes exiting the cave the way the scientists came in impossible. They'll have to follow the water and hope they find the sea.
With this decision Sanctum kicks into a genuinely thrilling survivial tale.
One by one poor decisions are met with a horrible death, either by drowning, smashing up on rocks or both. Tensions fray, villains are exposed, pockets of air are sucked out from the bottom of rocks. I loved every visceral and thrilling minute of the film's second two acts. I was literally on the edge of my seat, disbelief suspended like a class clown in middle school. For scene after scene, in defiance of all intellectualism, I sat there thinking: "Holy Crap, what would I do?"
Grierson knows how to shoot action, and when the shot calls for it, the Pace 3D system packs a wallop. The arguement that 3D can affect you on a psychological level seems to be working well here. This is pure, classic cinema that makes the most of new technology.
