Not only is this the worst horror film I've seen, its one of the worst films, period. The majority of the film is an abysmal assault on the senses, but the ugly, repugnant ending is what really seals the deal.This is a "special" kind of movie in its badness. Its not so bad its good. Its not so bad it can be riffed on (seriously, try it and you'll be hard pressed to find anything to make fun of). Like other reviewers have stated, its just plain unwatchable. I seriously question the mental well-being of anyone who found The Cavern legitimately entertaining.Let's start with the filmmaking and script, which are astonishingly poor. The film is set in Kazakhstan, even though its referred to as Russia in the movie itself and on the IMDb plot summary. I didn't know the Kazakhstani wilderness looked so much like the California desert. The characters are all bland and uninteresting, so we have no reason to care about them. Why would one of the characters go caving on the anniversary of the death of a loved one's death as a result of a caving accident? The lighting is just terrible; all the scenes in the cave are lit only with headlamps. This wouldn't be so bad if we could tell what's going on, but none of the light reflects off the cave walls since its always shining directly into the camera. The epileptic flash photography sequences don't help, either. This makes for a very disorienting experience. My best guess is they were attempting to recreate The Descent, a cave film that also used no studio lighting. Here's the difference: The Descent was made by competent filmmakers who knew how to utilize the low light levels to create suspense while still showing the audience what was going on. The blinding headlamps coupled with the frantic editing in The Cavern make the narrative almost incomprehensible. There were a couple dumb moments I was able to pick out, though. One of the characters suggests they douse their headlamps so the creature won't see them. That would do literally nothing since cave-dwelling animals are typically blind and rely entirely on their other senses. Another character suggests they split up. It may be a horror cliche, but splitting up is one of the worst things you can do in a situation like that!So far the movie has been really bad. But the ending? You ain't seen nothing yet!In the final scene, the two surviving girls wake up naked by an obviously fake CGI fire in the cave, wrapped in animal fur blankets. They find a picture from 1980 of what looks like a 10-year-old boy. Rather hilariously, they eat some cooked meat only to find its the charred remains of one of their friends. A caveman with a burnt face is revealed to be the attacker. In a confusing flashback, its revealed that the boy in the picture survived a plane crash and decided to become a caveman. How has this boy (who I assume had no survival experience at the time) survive more than a week? This raises so many more questions like how does a normal human move giant rocks by himself, see in the dark, and survive gunshots? The creatures in The Descent had abilities and weaknesses within reason, and the fact they evolved in caves was a believable excuse as to why they were so good at moving in the dark. The fact the monster is a normal human is absolutely stupid.But wait, it gets worse...Up to this point the film has been insultingly stupid and incompetent, but the last 20 seconds is where it goes from abysmal to morally reprehensible. The last 20 seconds is a blast of badly edited shaky cam and screaming. I had no idea what was happening, and I assumed he killed them. Then I looked up the plot summary on Wikipedia and it turns out that he killed one and raped the other. I went back through that final scene frame by frame and could (vaguely) make out that that was indeed what was happening.Here's the problem: you can't end your movie mid-rape! Not only does it make for a deplorable, dissatisfying experience that leaves a sour taste in the viewer's mouth, but it simply doesn't work artistically. What do most movies have the The Cavern doesn't? The answer is elevation. I have no problem with unhappy or unsatisfying endings. Films like Se7en, John Carpenter's The Thing, Funny Games, and even The Descent may not have happy endings, but they all serve an artistic purpose and give the audience something to think about. The ending of The Cavern makes me think if a rape victim saw this, the last thing they'd see before the credits is a reminder of what is most likely the most traumatizing experience of their lives with no light at the end of the (both physical and metaphorical) tunnel. I have no problem with the inclusion of a rape scene as long as there's a point. Honestly, the fact that the rape scene is the ending is what bothers me so much. I wouldn't be so mad if there was more after the rape. If, for example, the scene suddenly cut to black and was followed by a sequence of killing the beast and finding a way out, it wouldn't be the greatest thing ever but it would have at least given this dumpster fire some kind of elevating resolution. Some connection between the main characters entering the cave (which looks vaguely like a vagina) and two of the characters having consensual sex early on in the film with a dweller of the cave having non-consensual sex may be intended, but you can't just end a movie there!I rarely ever give a movie a 0 because to do so implies I can't understand how anyone could get anything positive out of the experience. However, The Cavern really is THAT BAD to me.

If you want to waste precious time of your life, then watch this movie. Stupid story, bad photography, bad acting and so on. I really wonder how it is possible, that people put money in making such a bad movie. Even that actors want to participate in it. Unbelievable... They must be the ones in desperate need for some money. I have seen many movies. Good , bad, stupid, uncreative, fascinating, compelling, intriguing, moving, and whatsoever you Can feel through them. But this one tops all of them in being boring, dull, and leaving you completely unsatisfied. Leaving you with a feeling: Did I really waste time of my life watching this??? Am I so stupid??? If it would have been possible to rate in under 0, I would have giving it a -10!! It will be difficult to find something to waste your lifetime in a more unsatisfying way. Go look for something else!!!

Funny guys, those executives from DVD distribution companies. This film's original title is "Within" (as the unaltered opening & closing credits show us). As such, it was made and released in 2005. But it didn't hit DVD until 2006 (it least in my country it didn't). By then, more famous films like "The Cave" (2005) and "The Descent" (2005) had already been pretty successful. So "Within" was cleverly tagged by DVD distributors throughout the globe with different titles, like "The Cavern" and "Within The Cave" (as it was released on DVD in my country). Obviously, unsuspecting customers renting or buying it, were disappointed by the film's low-budget values, and started screaming "rip-off!", because they saw it as an inferior product trying to cash in on the success of those previous two films. To make things worse, the shaky-cam filming style had them linking this film to the immensely hyped "The Blair Witch Project" (that one zero-budget horror-effort that left its mark on contemporary film-making, six years earlier in 1999), so that got them screaming "rip-off!" a second time. Well, that's just too easy, folks. If you can't see beyond this, or if you're not even willing to at least try and look at this film from a different perspective, then just don't bother bashing it."Within" is not really like "The Blair Witch Project" (it's not a "faux documentaire"; there's no found footage here; there's no people speaking directly into the camera), and what it boils down to is this: People who say they liked "Blair Witch" and hated "Within" are either hype-loving hypocrites or simply fools who don't know what they're talking about. Seriously, if "Blair Witch" was good, then so is this. And actually, I like "Within" better. While most people will dismiss this as a crappy film from a clueless, untalented film-student, to me it's clear that director Olatunde Osunsanmi knew very well what he was doing. He seems very much aware of the restrictions he had, and instead of trying things he could never in a million years accomplish on this small budget, he focused on using the minimal means he had to great effect. Yes, "Within" is some sort of minimalistic version of "The Cave" vs. "The Descent" meets that one obscure Italian flick "Alien 2 Sulla Terra" (1980), but you can't condemn it for just that. When you can forget about those films, you'll find "Within" to be a pretty unique experience. As soon as the crew enters the uncharted cave, the tone is set and it doesn't change. At times it's hard to tell what's going on, but that just adds to the over-all effect of confusion & despair (just like the characters are experiencing). Plus, when you put "Within" alongside "The Strangeness" (another of those very few cave-horror films ever made, dating from 1985 this time), you'll definitely notice that "Within" has a very tight pace. Throw in a twist-like plot-device (near the end) borrowed from a completely different sub-genre (done before, yes, but loved by many true horror-fans), and how can you not like what's being presented here? For once, the twist was welcome, because I started to fear we would never really learn what the hell it was killing off the explorers. There's only a couple of gore effects, but they do look pretty neat & nasty. When you - especially with a shoe-string budget like this - can manage to make at least the killings and make-up effects look good, you're already doing an important part of the movie right. Even the brutal, abrupt ending almost had me cheering. Many viewers might perhaps disagree, but for me this was (one of) the right way(s) to end the film. A fine piece of tight & tense, claustrophobic & at times utterly disorientating low-budget work. But you'll have to be willing to step into this flick, and if you have a thing against shaky-cams, then don't even think about watching it."Within" might look very shoddy to the unexperienced eye (used to comfortably polished mainstream films). But when you've seen enough really badly made films, you'll noticed that "Within" was deliberately shot and edited the way it was. And it works. That's what makes the difference between this and plain crappy shot films. When watching this film, I already had this feeling that this was made by a young writer/director who would, slowly but surely, move on to bigger and better things eventually. And I already got my proof with just clicking on his filmography. This year (2009) Osunsanmi made a sci-fi/horror thriller, called "The Fourth Kind" with Milla Jovovich (not bad when you can get her for a second feature) about alien abductions (which seems to be getting a good buzz). And he also wrote the script for "Smokin' Aces 2", to be released in 2010. This guy's doing well, and he's got my vote.PS: I contemplated rating "WIthIN" only 6/10, but the - in my eyes - often unfair & unjustified bashings of it on these pages, persuaded me to grant it an extra point.

I'm not that much of an avid fan of horrors to have watched so many of them, but this one falls so easy into category of one of the worst three horrors I've seen in my whole life.Last few years with blooming of different horror types and genres, especially in department of "japanese horror remakes", a new small sub genre also appeared, so called "cave shriekers" so to speak. Caves are naturally a dark, claustrophobic and eerie places and if you take that and put it into premise of something unknown, dangerous, malicious lurking in the darkness - this usually means a basis for a good horror.Recent movies that exploited this idea were "The Descent" and "The Cave" and now (quite originally named) "The Cavern" follows same footprint. While "The Descent" was one hell of a edge-of-the-seat scary masterpiece, and also "The Cave" wasn't so bad after all - the latter of the three is not even a shadow of what a good horror should be.The Cavern is so predictable and utterly poorly directed you really can't get any chills or goosebumps even in bloodiest of scenes. Director and the crew tried (and failed) to cover it's low-budget origin with some hand-held shots a la Blair Witch Project and general poorly lit scenes often devoured by darkness. In the end it amounts to bunch of people running and screaming most of the film through corridors of cave you can't see, while occasional light from the lamp flickers in a way to cause you epilepsy and hand held camera tries it's best to strengthen the feeling of nausea.It's one thing to try to be minimalistic and experimental developing the scariness factor but here we have no substance nor surprises waiting around the corner, you just know every time when someone is about to die. The end would be disappointing (where cannibalism part isn't horrific in any way, just plain repulsive) if the whole movie wasn't already abundantly disappointing.To keep it short, try to watch chilling and memorable "The Descent" instead of "The Cavern", this is just the type of badly written and executed movie that causes flatline and annoyance at best, instead of adrenaline type of fear all true horrors should evoke.One to avoid.