Hollywood Eats B-Movies For Breakfast

With the release of potholing horror The Cave bearing a striking similarity to British underground horror The Descent, Mark Kermode rakes over the parasitic relationship between Hollywood and its low-budget cousins

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In my last Uncut column, I noted (as have several others) that Michael Bay's sci-fi thriller The Island is little more than an uncredited big budget remake of Robert S Fiveson's trash classic The Clonus Horror.

Now, at the risk of repeating myself, I note that the new Hollywood action-horror The Cave is little more than an expensive imitation of Neil Marshall's fabulous low-budget shocker The Descent.

In both films, a team of cavers lower themselves into a large pit, in which they are trapped following a rock fall, leaving them to discover that the only way out is down. In both movies, said climbers promptly discover that they are, in fact, not the first persons to have ventured into these hellish environs. And, in both movies, our heroes (or heroines) are then set upon by a bunch of ravenous beasties which have apparently been living underground for years, and have mutated and adapted to the subterranean lifestyle. Are you noticing any similarities here?

There are some differences, of course. The Cave, whose international budget (it's an American/German co-production with much Oz input) doubtless dwarfed The Descent's measly £3.5 million resources, boasts lots of expensive underwater photography and flashy special effects work. It features a cast headed up by Cole Hauser, and was shot on location in Romania and Mexico. The Descent, on the other hand, has a couple of guys in rubber suits, a cast of virtual unknowns, and was shot on location at Shepperton, and in a small patch of shrub-land near the M25.

Next page • "The Descent scares the living crap out of you"