Underground – Review
Directed by Lars Janssen and co-written and co- produced by Charlotte Dawn Potter, hen-do-turned-horror Underground is set for its UK digital debut on 26th of February, courtesy of Miracle Media.
Filmed “found footage” style, Underground takes us on a night out with a group of girls as they celebrate their friends hen do. One of the friends has brought a big camera along in order to document the adventures they’re sure to have on this crazy weekend as a present for the bride to be.
They go to a Guernsey hotel for a boozy stay away, and we join them in all of the lead up, getting ready for the night out and finding out the fancy dress costumes they’ve been chosen to wear. Frogs, dogs and Gordon Ramsay all feature.
It’s not long before the drinks, dancing and full-throttle celebrations become terribly twisted when a grumpy taxi driver and a wrong turn leaves them trapped underground and in their worst nightmare…
Never mind making it to the alter, will they make it out alive?
The film starts with a press conference outside a police station, the chief inspector is giving the latest updates to the assembled press about an obviously newsworthy event that has taken place, from which there remains some missing people. One of the reporters asks if there’s any truth to it being ghosties at a local underground hospital. He is quickly shut down by the chief, and we get zinged to the past. Wedding dress shopping with bride to be Ella (Maaike Tol) and her girlfriends.
One of her mates, Claire (Nadia Dawber) has got hold of a pro style camera (nicked from the brides mum) to make videos of the wedding fun.
We then go on a trip to collect and get to know the rest of the cast, which is a clever way of character and world building for a found footage type affair. Jessica (Caitlyn Barber) is a singer and so we meet her in a studio to prove she’s a serious artiste, then it’s straight to a footy pitch to pick up sporty hen Ziggy (Sapphire Brewer-Marchant), then last but not least posh hen Riley (Charlotte Dawn Potter) gets picked up from the airport and off to the hotel for pre club drinky poos.
They’re going on a hen do so of course there’s fancy dress costumes required Ziggy is a frog, Jess is a dog, Riley’s Gordon Ramsay, Ella is a receptionist and Claire his The Rock when he did his famous bum bag turtle neck combo photo, she suits it too!
On the way back from the club after one too many sherbets, One of the girls gets sick into Ramsay’s wig, which enrages Dave the cabbie(Dave King) so much that he chucks all these young ladies out of his cab in the middle of nowhere. Who says chivalry is dead. He’s obviously never heard of charging the cleaning fee to the passenger. Nope, get out and walk biatches!!
They’re near a “tunnel thing” underground hospital built by the nazi’s which has an urban legend of being haunted. If you knock on the gate three times, you will hear something back.
Ziggy knocks on the gate three times, nothing. But as they walk off there’s a loud bang from the gate.
They quite rightly decide this is their cue to give it toes back to the hotel and as they take a shortcut Ziggy falls through a hatch and breaks her leg.
They go down to help her and end up trapped in the tunnels of this hospital, which is clearly used as a tourist attraction now.
Up to this point, I was engrossed. The film sets up the characters nicely, they all act in fairly realistic ways and their dialogue is natural. The characters are fully fleshed out and three dimensional, the found footage camera style was explained and believably executed with the girls taking the camera from each other in order to film, which gives everyone a chance to be on screen and build their characters. Nice!
As they try to find a way out of this maze of tunnels, they encounter some odd things, which don’t particularly seem to bother them, which is where I began to struggle with the story. One of them sees a figure walk across the gloomy background, they have a cursory check and shrug it off, keep calm and carry on, fitting for a WW2 bunker I suppose.
A phone inside one of the display cases starts ringing, again they don’t seem that bothered.
Ziggy literally disappears and they aren’t particularly out of their minds with this fact. They discover a huge chalk pentagram on the floor and a load of eternally burning candles that scream SATANIC RITUAL!!! so of course being a bit drunk they mess about around it. Cue more shenanigans of a spooky kind and some form of demonic entity, ghost nazis, hallucinations and overall oddness which I won’t go too far into as it would only take us into deep spoiler territory.
The film sadly lacks a feeling of claustrophobic dread that its setting should bring, there’s almost too much going on down there to provide any level of peril and the way the girls react to it all just doesn’t seem like they’re particularly bothered either, which is a shame. I also couldn’t help shake the feeling that they may as well have just waited for the place to open to the public the next day, as it looked like it was still very much in use.
The film’s really well shot, with clever use of the self recorded footage, although this goes slightly awry at the end with other footage adding to the mix. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense in parts why they would be still filming or that the spirits are caught on film. Each event that befalls the girls just seems to be a singular, remote event and not linked to anything in particular, there’s no building of any fear here when the setting and story could have really done this to great effect.
The special effects are o.k. with sound effects and visual glitches being used to good effect but they do fall into the trap of having things that couldn’t/wouldn’t be recorded being in the film in parts.
The acting throughout is good, with all of the girls being likeable and all with distinct characters, even that annoying taxi driver wasn’t too bad.
Overall this is a pretty enjoyable film, there isn’t really a big reveal of any mind blowing kind, and it just kind of plods along once they get in the tunnels, but its still an entertaining watch and fans of the genre will really enjoy it.
Fresh terrors are lurking Underground on UK digital from 26th February from Miracle Media, watch the trailer below.
