My expectations weren't nearly as high as I was for the screening of tonight's review, a schizophrenic dollar store Descent clone for the impecunious; packed with less flavor than a rice cake, disorganized dialog delivered within the one note range of rank amateurs and with the truth of a reality show. It took me two sittings to get all the way through this mutt of a monster movie, having passed the fuck out on one prior attempt. That's never a good sign, in my experience...
"Stroke of luck we stumbled upon this discreet, Panamanian fuck-lagoon, eh?"
Five obnoxious twenty-somethings (Four Americans, one Australian) of little virtue and less character have uprooted their "horns up, breeh!" attitude for a vacation in Panama, if by vacation you mean "endless body shots, gay jokes, and ignominious pick up lines", that is. Several uninspired partying montages later, Trevor (Pierson Fode) has made the acquaintance of local honey dip, Carmen (Lauren Penuela) and her amigo, Julio (Juanxo Villaverd), and when she isn't blueballing her new American love interest, she's teasing he and his steak-pussed friends about an alleged breathtaking waterfall and mystic pool combo somewhere in the Darien Gap, off limits to gringos since the last group of teenagers got waxed by chupacabras, who also take time off from sucking the blood of Texas livestock for some much needed R n' R in Central America, it would seem. After some righteous surfing, Julio again warns the entourage to steer clear of the jungle gap,but Carmen decides to round them up the next morning and drive them there, any old way.
"Let's sync up our flashlights, and show these bastards what they're messing with!"
After a fruitless private liaison in a nearby lagoon, Carmen and Trevor get separated while scoping out weird jungle noises (you know the kind that always preempt sex in movies like this), and before too long Carmen disappears amidst some blood-curdling screams, leaving behind only a pulverized smart phone. Fleeting glimpses of prowling beasts of unknown origin become more frequent as the survivors climb towards ground high enough to provide cell phone service, and as the forest grows darker the vacationers are subtracted in ones from the equation by this pale race of murderers, who are but a cave system away from being a flagrant rip off of Neil Marshall's subterranean sinners in his 2005 effort, The Descent. Is that a cave?? You've gotta be kidding me. Many unremarkable circumstances pack the final reel right up until the end credits, and though I'm not gonna elaborate further upon them here, you can imagine exactly what most of them entail by this point in the piece, I'm sure. Let's wrap it up already.
"...you gonna accept my Candy Crush Saga request or what?"
Tonight's movie kind of plays like the aforementioned Descent, if it was tackled by MTV Studios ultra-leftist propaganda machine, and cast from that show where skateboarder Rob Dyrdek entertains an audience of catatonic hipsters with video clips that are readily available to anyone with a Wi-Fi connection that knows how to use a browser. Even America's Funniest Home Videos had more appeal than that, ferchrissakes. These characters are abrasively self-absorbed and shallow as a vomit splash, nobody's rooting for any of them, besides maybe Lauren Penuela's Carmen, who's hot enough to stay tuned long enough to chuckle at her total disregard for common sense while speaking highly of her own virtue at every juncture. Other than that, there's really nothing out of the ordinary here at all, and on the scale, a single Wop is par for this particular, repetitive course. Avoid.
"Blew it! You shoulda picked the Wet Willie!"
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