text: Basically an endearingly chintzy and moronic $1.50 version of the nifty early 80's subterranean creature feature favorite "The Boogens," this entertainingly schlocky cheapie centers on a nasty, squirmy, wriggling monster who makes an instant meal out of any unfortunate souls foolhardy enough to go poking around the notoriously off limits Gold Spike Mine. Your standard-issue motley assortment of intrepid boneheads -- hectoring hard-nosed mine boss, cute, but insipid blonde babe, feisty lady geologist, boozy, inexplicably Aussie-accented (!) seasoned old mine hand, charmless doofus, hunky, jolly guy, and, arguably the most annoying character of the uniformly irritating bunch, a nerdy bespectacled aspiring writer dweeb who's prone to speaking in flowery, melodramatic utterances -- trek into the dark, uninviting cave in search of gold. Naturally, these intensely insufferable imbeciles discover that the allegedly abandoned mine is the home of a deadly, ugly, multi-tentacled beast who in time honored hoary B-flick fashion proceeds to gruesomely bag the group one at a time. Directed, co-written, co-produced and co-edited with dumbfounding maladroitness by Melanie Anne Phillips, acted with dismaying flatness by a rank no-name cast, further marred by lethargic pacing, a drably meandering narrative, murky, under-lit, eye-straining cinematography, a shivery, redundantly thudding pseudo-John Carpenter synthesizer score, and a cruddy, herky-jerky stop motion animation wormoid thingie that's only quickly glimpsed at the very end of the movie, this extremely clunky, amateurish and hence quite delectably dreadful would-be scarefest commits all the necessary bad film missteps to qualify as a real four-star stinkeroonie.