You know what? I can take the cheese, I can take the poorly written characters, I can take the atrocious dialogue, I can take the threadbare plot, and I can even take the uniformly bad acting. Heck, some of my favorite movies of all time are early-80s slashers, and they're not known for being great art. My point is I love low-budget, cheesy movies. I'm here for it.
But you know what I'm not here for? A movie that has NO ending. At least in an 80s slasher, you could almost always count on a balls-to-the-walls, over the top ending that could allow you to partially recoup your time investment. In horror, the third act is where your money is. An audience will forgive a lot if you give them a great ending.
In What Lies Below, they apparently forgot to craft ANY ending at all. I could have taken the barely passable first two acts of this movie if the third act had just let it rip. Go insane, go completely and utterly crazy. Go gross out, go icky-sticky, go bloodbath, go off the deep end, jump the shark. But do SOMETHING! Make some kind of statement. A great, ballsy ending would have made it easier to give the rest of this movie a little bit of a break.
Instead, we get the worst possible ending any film can give: the abrupt "non-ending" with no explanation and no resolution, leaving you wondering why you were stupid enough to dispose of 90 minutes of your life for a director and writers who clearly didn't value your time. Or respect their own.
In conclusion, WLB is a mess. Instead of the crappy parts of this movie--and there are many--leading to at least a fun and crazy ending, the crapy parts end up being all there is. What an insulting train wreck. Extremely unsatisfying! There's good cheese and bad cheese in movies. This is rotten cheese. Pass.
