I was at a Q&A with the director Joe Dante and the topic of this movie came up. Its clear that this film has been missed by many due to its lack of distribution. However its well worth your time if you can track it down. Its basically a teen psychological horror which has themes from a number of 80s horrors like IT, Puppetmaster, The Gate and Paperhouse. It was originally a 3D movie however its still watchable in 2D. Theres a few old faces from previous Dante movies although the rest of cast may be new to you but they all do a great job. I'd recommend this as a family/teen fun horror that wont give the kids nightmares.....unless they have a thing about clowns.

The Hole took years to find a US distributor, which Dante attributes to a saturated 3D market - where his small film never had a chance, but regardless of what dimension it's playing in, it's not very good. It feels like it's made for television and looks cheap and the over lit digital cinematography murders any atmosphere. Chris Massoglia is an unappealing lead and is out shined by the young Nathan Gamble. The film would have probably worked better if the leads were both around 10 years old, as an older teen keeping the plot of the movie away from his mom is too silly. Here and there The Hole ratchets up a few scenes of tension, but the last act suffers from a rushed 'face your fears' end and the results are hokey and about as frightening as a Goosebumps episode. Not a good return to the director's chair for Dante.

One can see that the makers of this movie grew up with old horror films, the ones that were about you, not some cliché annoying teen that just screamed for death or some deranged woman scared of everything. They were mostly about facing your fear, rather than succumb to its implacability.The Hole is like that. It is a movie about two brothers, one a kid, the other barely a teen. Their single mom moves them to a new town, a new house, and they discover this weird hole in their basement, through which all their fears take shape and come forth. Who will win in the end? Courage or fear?Now, the movie can be considered a horror, but really is mostly not scary. The small child, the teen boy and his female counterpart next door are normal people. No highschool dramas, no crazy parties that lead to unsanctioned fornication and subsequent killing spree (man, the people making those films have some repressed feelings), no screaming and running aimlessly. They are just exploring kids, trying to understand and stay ahead of the inexplicable.In that sense the film is similar to Under the Bed, also a film about two brothers fighting their fear and also one that shows clear love for the genre, in the classical sense. They both feel like 80's movies, especially the special effects (*cough*cough*), but that is a good thing for me.Bottom line: if you (secretly) miss Poltergeist and the original Nightmare on Elm Street, you will love this movie. Being a rather non violent film, you could even watch it with your young ones.The director is Joe Dante, who also directed gems like The Howling, Gremlins and a few episodes of Eerie, Indiana. If I think about it, the children in the film remind me of that show a lot. Bruce Dern plays a small role and Dick Miller, veteran horror actor that played in many of Dante's films, makes a cameo appearance as the pizza delivery man.

A promising set-up with some sprightly, well-edited scripting by Mark L. Smith goes sadly awry in the movie's second half, degenerating into a series of contrived, loosely connected vignettes when each of the young protagonists must face separate horror scenarios. Hackneyed and lackluster, the result is depressingly reminiscent of HOUSE, TROLL, WAXWORK, and all such tepidly similar episodic monster flicks from back in the '80s. Director Joe Dante has since claimed that his intent was a return to "suburban horror" of 30 years ago; even if true, the movie would have been best left in its time capsule, wrapped in Hammertime harem pants.