text: "The Cellar" is an intolerably dull and overly child-friendly 80's cheese parade, directed by Kevin Tenney (creator of the much better films "Witchboard" and "Night of the Demons") and starring the incredibly untalented Patrick Kilpatrick, supposedly depicting a guy with feelings. The pacing is really slow, the plot feels far too familiar, the monster-effects are all but petrifying and the film opens and ends with tedious narrative ranting that somehow feels unrelated to the actual subject matter of the film. The voice-over keeps on nagging about wind and creatures riding on wind, but what the hell, there's no wind in the plot? Like so many 80's horror movies, "The Cellar" handles about cursed Indian landscapes and all-too-real mythical monsters hidden in basements and quagmires. Mance Cashen and his family move into a house build on what once was the home of Native Americans, but then white people came and turned the land into oil fields. Half of the script is wasted on explaining the origin of the monster, but I can easily summarize it for you: an ancient Indian witchdoctor summoned the creature (which looks like an over-sized paper-mâché rat) to annihilate the white people overflowing his land but he buried it again because, and I quote, the SOB kills Indians as well. Mance's hugely irritating son accidentally awakens the beast and naturally can't convince his parents about the big hungry rat in the cellar. The allegedly emotional family situation (daddy constantly wants his son to love him) is very pathetic and redundant and the film badly needed more bloodshed; kids' movie or not. The youthful hero (Chris Miller) is quite annoying, but we've definitely seen worse kid actors in the 80's. "The Cellar" is very much not recommended, unless of course you're a fan of cheesy and typically 80's monster designs. The big dodgy rat-thing is a real hoot to see.