Critic Reviews

Director Joe (Gremlins) Dante delivers some terrific spine-tingling chills on the way towards a disappointingly overblown climax.

Where The Hole really scores — and this is rare in modern horror — is in its lead characters.

Hardly the most original film of the year, but one of the most purely pleasurable. The ideal horror intro for fledgling genre fans – scary fun that definitely fills a hole.

With playful touches of Spielberg, Shyamalan and even Hitchcock, veteran director Joe Dante has confected a neat little scary movie, not explicitly violent, but pretty scary nonetheless.

Dante plays the early scenes perfectly, racking up the clammy dread without tipping over into outright nastiness. But somewhere along the way, the tension dissipates.

Like earlier Dante classics The Gremlins and The Burbs, The Hole marries the fantastical, the horrific, and the mundane, but in this case, the fantastical isn’t that fantastic, the horrific isn’t scary, and the mundane is way too mundane. All the elements are here, they just don’t add up to a satisfying whole.

Cool it may be, but scary (or even mildly shudder-inducing) it ain’t, even in 3-D.