As the helicopter cleared the jungle canopy for the first awe-inspiring, 3D look at the stony maw of the Esa-ala cave system in New Guinea, I thought: sanctum? It's more like a rectum. And appropriately so. The visuals in Alister Grierson's suffocatingly bad film impress, but not nearly as much as the dialogue, so terrible that I was sure producer James Cameron wrote it (he did not). Not to mention characters and a plot that make Titanic read like Shakespeare. Searching for the undiscovered tunnel out to the ocean from the above-mentioned cavern, a bunch of non-entities in scuba gear find themselves trapped when a cyclone shuts down their exit and they have to plumb deeper into the abyss to make their way out. "Don't ever give up," counsels the team leader (Richard Roxburgh). Strange sentiment in a movie with a gung-ho attitude toward suicide and euthanasia. As for myself, I gave up at the line "I won't wear the wetsuit of a dead woman!"
