Director – David Michael Hillman [Melanie Anne Phillips], Additional Scenes Directed by Chris Huntley, Screenplay/Music – David Michael Hillman & Chris Huntley, Producers – David Michael Hillman, Chris Huntley & Mark Sawicki, Photography – Steven Greenfield & Kevin O’Brien, Visual Effects – Chris Huntley & Mark Sawicki. Production Company – Stellarwind Productions.
Cast
Mark Sawicki (Dan Flanders), Keith Hurt (Morgan), Dan Lunham (Myron Calvert), Terri Berland (Cindy Flanders), Rolf Theison (Myron Hemmings), Chris Huntley (Tony Ruggles), Diane Borcyckowski (Angela Platt), Robin Sortman (Brian), Arlene Buchmann (Amy)
Plot
A team are convened to investigate the abandoned Golden Spike Mine. Included among the group are miners, a geologist, a photographer and a writer. The writer Dan Flanders has heard the rumours about the mine – that something caused the miners to flee in fear. As they venture down into the shafts, they are trapped by a cave-in and then discover that something stirs in the depths of the mine.
The Strangeness was an obscure 1980s video release. The film has a 1980 copyright date but was not seen until five years after that. Director David Michael Hillman was in reality a woman director Melanie Anne Phillips, although she only ever directed one other film with the earlier family film Brothers of the Wilderness (1984) where she adopted the same male surname she did here. This makes The Strangeness one of the first women-directed horror films with Phillips preceded only by a handful of others such as Alice Guy-Blache, Stephanie Rothman and Gabrielle Beaumont.
My initial suspicion was that The Strangeness was a low-budget copy of the underground horror film Secrets of the Phantom Caverns/What Waits Below (1984) but the timing of the release dates shows that it predates that film. This may well make The Strangeness the first work on the theme of people venturing into caves and mines and stirring something that we saw in later films such as The Descent (2005) and The Cave (2005) – see Centre of the Earth and Underground Adventures.
On the other hand, this is a cave venture conducted on a really low budget – all we get is the occasional mine wall, while much of the action takes place with everything surrounded in darkness, which could easily have been the actors on an otherwise empty soundstage with little lighting.
The Lovecraftian underground monster
There is some amusement to be gained from the character of Mark Sawicki as the writer among the group as he narrates his book into a tape recorder while taking quite a degree of dramatic licence with what happens. There are some amusing scenes in his interviews with Keith Hurt, which always end up with the punchline of a joke being pulled on Sawacki. Keith Hurt affects an incredibly fake British accent in ways that make you wince.
The film creates a really interesting monster. It looks something Lovecraftian – a mass of writhing tentacles. The main problem is that it never does anything. There is one scene with someone dragged off and another where they might have been. However, there is no fight with or flight from the monster, not even any explanation of what it is. Most of the drama in the film is about the group searching for a way out to freedom following a cave-in – you cannot help but feel that when a monster is created, the threat and drama the group face should derive from this. The Descent is a textbook example of how this should work. But here budgetary limitations end with the monster only being glimpsed a bare minimum of times.
