Beneath the ruins of a medieval church deep within the Carpathian Mountains, a team of expert explorers led by Jack (Cole Hauser, “2 Fast 2 Furious”) and his impetuous little brother Tyler (Eddie Cibrian, NBC’s “Third Watch”) are sent to investigate a massive underground cave system. With the latest cave diving equipment at their disposal, this crack unit is well trained to handle any and every event that could possibly come their way.

At least, that’s what they think. After a mysterious explosion and the death of one of their team seals off the entrance, the scientists discovers trying to find an exit before they run out of food and supplies is the least of their worries. Jack, Tyler and company are being hunted, stalked by a winged creature that knows their every move. Worse, tagalong biologist Kathryn (Lena Heady, also in this week’s "The Brothers Grimm”) is sure the creature’s bite passes on an infectious parasite. If she’s right, this could spell doom for the explorers, the person they trust most to save them maybe the most dangerous enemy of them all.

Before “The Cave” began a gentleman went to the front of the theater and showed off an incredibly impressive underwater diving apparatus called the Megladon-something-or-other (forgive me if I can’t quite remember). This rebreather is incredible, allowing divers to go down to depths so low it might take them six hours to come back up to the surface. There was a lot of techno mumbo-jumbo going on I couldn’t quite follow, but even then I was still so amazed by what the machine allows a person to accomplish underwater I couldn’t stop asking the diver questions. (It probably helped that the guy was cute in a big bearish football player sort of way. Not exactly my type, but still cute, and I certainly wouldn’t turn him down if he ever called for a date.)

What does any of this have to do with the movie? Well, the Megladon is the rebreather featured in the film, and even if screenwriters Michael Steinberg (“Sleep with Me”) and Tegan West do push the envelope as to what the machine can actually do (this is Hollywood after all), it’s still neat to see it in action. This is also the only interesting thing I can come up with to talk about when discussing “The Cave,” the flick about as ponderous and boring as a supposedly thrilling underground creature-feature could ever hope to get and not put people to sleep.

Seriously, this is an astonishingly ludicrous waste of time. While I’ll freely admit Pier Luigi Basile’s (“Amityville II: The Possession”) production design is stunning and Wes Skiles’ (co-director of the IMAX documentary “Journey Into Amazing Caves”) underwater photography is astonishing, that still doesn’t mean the resulting picture is any good. Not only is Patrick Tatopoulos’ (“I, Robot”) creature design laughable, but the actors (other than Hauser who somehow manages to make it through unscathed) give some of most shockingly awful performances I’ve seen all year. And yet, considering how good many of them, including Morris Chestnut (“Ladder 49”) and Piper Perabo (“Coyote Ugly”), have been in other productions I’m not too sure this is entirely their fault.

Blame the writers and freshman director Bruce Hunt. While the movie moves well and is shot beautifully, the concept of either thrills and/or chills appears to be a foreign concept to all three of them. I called ever twist, turn, jump, shock, scare and surprise long before any of them ever actually occurred, and if I was half as rude as the gaggle of teenagers talking continuously behind us I could have revealed them to everyone around me. Granted, as obvious as “The Cave” is they probably had everything figured out, too, so even if I had shouted out the surprises doing so would have been nothing more than a wasted breath.

Cribbing freely from the Dracula legends, “Alien,” “The Thing,” “The Abyss,” “Pitch Black” and even the god-awful (and admittedly far, far worse) “Leviathan,” it’s the script that is the real disaster. Even for a glorified B-movie this is pretty lame, and for the life of me I can’t quite figure out how the duo convinced a studio to finance it. In all fairness, if the cast were a little better and the direction was a bit more confident this might actually play pretty decently in a guilty pleasure sort of way. The bones of the story aren’t terrible, and the idea of a monster-driven horror show deep under the Earth’s surface is certainly intriguing.

So this might work. Might, but I certainly doubt it. For me, there were only two things I enjoyed while watching “The Cave.” The first was the gentleman with the rebreather, a nice enough guy showing off an interesting piece of equipment that made me actually consider taking diving lessons. The second was the end credits and the cornball pop song that accompanied them. I’ll let you decide which one pleased me the most.

Film Rating: ê  (out of 4)