With a dab of science-fiction, a good jab of horror and a sizable dose of adventure, What Waits Below would end up being a fun romp deep underground featuring creatures reminiscent of the Morlocks from H.G. Wells’ famous outing The Time Machine. That said, this movie manages to do its own thing despite any familiarities and creates something a little different where horror movies were concerned in 1985.

Summing it all up, two groups of people in Central America are working in tandem though each has their own agenda in mind. The United States military is looking to run tests for a new type of radio transmitter underground, they simply need an access point to do so. Enter a group of specialists who want to preserve what they find and hopefully make the discovery of a lifetime. They of course end up clashing but while doing so, discover a huge underground system which might be exactly what everyone was looking for. There is a slight problem with that being the fact that they are not alone when they go underground, the area inhabited by others who do not take kindly upon trespassers.

Based on a story by Ken Barnett and adapted by Christy Marx while Don Sharp would direct, the movie would start out quite slow. The first third of the film would definitely take its’ time in introducing everyone as well as the conflicts between them and while not necessarily a bad thing as it would give a lot of room for characterization, it would test the limits of the audience as they waited patiently for something to happen. Once everyone moved underground though, things would definitely pick up both in terms of pace and action as those cave dwellers or Lemurians as they were discovered to be started to kill off members of the army specialists. Sharp would inject a good bit of horror into the proceedings, playing upon people’s fear of the dark and making it claustrophobic at times. The Lemurians themselves were quite spooky when they stuck to the shadows but once they were fully revealed, they lost a bit of that magic which was a shame. There were also some kind of monster snakes that would kill a few people throughout which suffered the same fate once fully revealed but when taken as a whole, both snakes and cave-people were effective thanks to some decent makeup and special effects.

Starring Robert Powell, Timothy Bottoms and Lisa Blount, they would aid in making this picture a little better than it might have been otherwise though to be fair, the rest of the cast was fairly decent as well. When it comes down to it, the cast, the story, the idea and even the direction were altogether good. It was simply for the fact that it would all start up too slowly and then once things got going, it would lose some of its steam and become a little too fantastical, fighting for the right to lead the tribe being one example. If the makers of this film had focused more on the horror aspect of it all, perhaps things might have turned out a little differently and a better movie might have emerged.

For those that might not have seen it, What Waits Below is worth one viewing at the very least though there are better movies with similar subjects that pull off the subject matter a little better.

2.5 out of 5