If You're Going to The Cave, Bring a Girl

I really struggled with the first half of 2005's The Cave. It seemed like it was deliberately edited to mute all of the tension and suspense. Then, halfway though, a pretty girl in a tube top tries to climb a sheer wall while fighting a gargoyle and it got kind of good.

Piper Perabo plays the girl in the tube top and she barely has a presence in the movie before that scene. I don't even think she gets one closeup as the film mostly focuses on a team of interchangeable bros with a lot of looped dialogue and odd cutting choices that make me think it was all edited down from a much longer cut. This combined with the boring cinematography and featureless glob of action music and sound effects made the first half of the film a torturous purgatory.

Then it seemed like the filmmakers woke up because Piper Perabo took off some clothes and tried something dangerous. It certainly got my attention. Suddenly the pacing became perfectly sensible and logical, the cutting between reaction shots and POV shots of gloom and shadowy movements were genuinely gripping.

The story follows a team of spelunkers investigating a cave system in Romania. They encounter monsters, possibly meant to be vampires, but they're consciously styled on the alien from Alien. Lena Headey and Daniel Dae Kim were the only other performers I recognised and their parts were relatively small. Headey does have a few interesting moments.

X Sonnet #1880

A golden pen was filled with yellow ink.
Arrested leaves prevent the winter's start.
Tomato sauce enticed the present link.
Heroic chains would bind the page's heart.
An icy swim would not appeal to skates.
Corruption turns the rubber blades to props.
Beneath the icy cake, the sprinkle waits.
Sorbet is not sorbet when gummy drops.
The sticky word would track the dough to home.
When nothing sticks, the batter flies above.
The winds of folly scatter salt to Rome.
A squawking metal bird would kill the dove.
As heat decides the time of storms we wait.
Not ev'ry star will take a moon to mate.