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Wartime Afghanistan: When Sgt. Griffin (Justin Arnold) and his squad
(Matt Musgrove, Mingyu Chu, Ny'acies Divine, Masika Kalysha, John Vargas)
get into a Taliban ambush, they find no other way out than to retreat to a
nearby cave - the entrance of which is promptly blown up, too. Thing is,
the cave is already occuppied by Tagger (Nick Chinlund) and his right hand
Reid (Kevin Grevioux), two CIA-employed smugglers supposed to ship some
crates out of the country, crates they're very particular nobody touches -
and Griffin and company are pretty much forced to oblige as only Tagger
knows an alternative exit out of the caves, which is a few miles off, too.
However the caves aren't the best place to have a stroll in, they're home
to football-big spiders, are littered with corpses, there's a drug lab
replete with an emmitting gas that gives our heroes hallucinations - and
then there's of course the Karnoctus, a sort of Afghan Bigfoot,
a creature that just loves to hunt and kill. And not only has the monster
the advantage of knowing the territory and lightning speed, it's also
really hard to kill, so even a squad of well-equipped American soldiers
are soon forced into the defense - to put it mildly ... Now
this is not a film that re-invents cinema or even monster movies, and it
deliberately borrows from genre classics like Alien
and Predator, to name just two -
but then, what it does it does very well, and that's create an atmosphere
and unease, play heavy on tension and suspense, place all the violence and
jump scares in all the right moments, and fill the film with just enough
humour to keep the premise from coming across as being ridiculous. In
other words, not the best movie you've ever seen, but a pretty great genre
trip nevertheless.
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