Below 2002

Janice Page, Boston Globe: With more character development this might have been an eerie thriller; with better payoffs, it could have been a thinking man's monster movie. Read more

John Monaghan, Detroit Free Press: Distances you by throwing out so many red herrings, so many false scares, that the genuine ones barely register. Read more

Susan Stark, Detroit News: Read more

Robert K. Elder, Chicago Tribune: Twohy pulls all the strings to create an inventive genre piece. Read more

Dave Kehr, New York Times: Below may not mark Mr. Twohy's emergence into the mainstream, but his promise remains undiminished. Read more

Ted Fry, Seattle Times: Alive with creepy, menacing flair. Read more

Manohla Dargis, Los Angeles Times: If Below had been released in 1943 -- the year of its story -- it would have come in at an agile 70 minutes instead of a protracted 104. Read more

Eric Harrison, Houston Chronicle: The reason Below gets beneath your skin is that the scriptwriters know what most current horror filmmakers never learned: Fear is an emotion, not a visceral response. Read more

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: Directed by David Twohy with the same great eye for eerie understatement that he brought to Pitch Black. Read more

Gary Dowell, Dallas Morning News: Becomes swamped early on and spends the rest of its running time dragging itself to Davy Jones' Locker, and us along with it. Read more

Dan Fienberg, L.A. Weekly: A surprisingly unnerving production that shouldn't be allowed to slip beneath the radar. Read more

Jan Stuart, Newsday: Twohy knows how to inflate the mundane into the scarifying, and gets full mileage out of the rolling of a stray barrel or the unexpected blast of a phonograph record. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: While director David Twohy arguably doesn't mine the premise for all it's worth, he gets enough out of it to make it an effective Halloween treat. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: Below has ambitions to be better than average, but doesn't pull itself together and insist on realizing them. Read more

Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle: Twohy's overwrought, comic-book theatrics work against him, as does the hokey script. Read more

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Read more

Todd McCarthy, Variety: While the mystery surrounding the nature of the boat's malediction remains intriguing enough to sustain mild interest, the picture refuses to offer much accompanying sustenance in the way of characterization, humor or plain old popcorn fun. Read more

Justine Elias, Village Voice: Though the genre collisions ... are as jarring as the sound design, the cumulative effect is one of claustrophobic creepiness. Read more

Desson Thomson, Washington Post: An enjoyable, if occasionally flawed, experiment. Read more