Flavio wrote:

Liz Enkittengasm wrote:

The UK ending would have been what they telegraphed throughout the whole movie. The US ending was just nonsensical. I couldn't tell what was actually supposed to happen right at the end - is she supposed to be crazy now and seeing dead people? Did the asian chick make it out and is now going to kill and eat her? No clue.

The US ending? There's a brief flash of her opening her eyes lit up by torchlight, so it was still just a dream and she was still in the cave.

Instead of a gorefest, it probably would have worked much better with a Blair Witch approach (although they did borrow a lot of elements from that). Have the majority of the movie be about the women freaking out more and more the longer they were trapped down there (what happened to the great sense of claustraphobia they established early on? everything widened into giant corridors you could run through after that). Have Sarah hear more voices (freaking the audience out that she'll have another "pole through the eye" hallucination, which was the single creepiest moment in the movie). As the paranoia sets in, others start hearing the sounds too through the power of suggestion. Wake up to find member missing? Wake up to find bloody teeth at the campsite? Unseen movement causing them to run and scatter in a panic?

Then have some sort of subtle revealing that it was Sarah all along. I think it could have been done well as long as they avoided the clumsy and overdone "flashback montage" showing her in place of the monsters (Hide and Seek style).

The real confusing thing is that it's like they started to set this up, then never carried through and just went with the more obvious monster ending. The birthday cake scenes went nowhere. And the subtle parts never matured. Notice that a monster murder never happened while Sarah was around? Or that she killed five monsters total? How about the fact that Juno's protege is the first to be killed, fitting revenge against someone you blame for the death of your daughter?

I wish my camcorder had "infrared mode", which looks surprisingly just like nightvision; nightvision with the amazing ability to function in the pitch blackness of a mile deep cave.