Something Beneath

Something Beneath
DVD cover
Directed by	David Winning
Written by	Mark Mullin Ethlie Ann Vare David Winning
Produced by	Phyllis Laing
Starring	Kevin Sorbo Natalie Brown Brendan Beiser
Cinematography	Brenton Spencer
Edited by	Mark Sanders
Music by	Michael Richard Plowman
Production companies	RHI Entertainment Buffalo Gal Pictures Hallmark Entertainment Paquin Films Sci Fi Pictures
Distributed by	Time Warner Cable
Release dates	April 26, 2007 (2007-04-26) (Houston Film Festival) October 21, 2007 (2007-10-21) (Canada)
Running time	90 minutes
Country	Canada
Language	English

Something Beneath is a 2007 Canadian horror thriller film directed by David Winning and starring Kevin Sorbo, Natalie Brown and Brendan Beiser. It is the 5th film in the Maneater Series.

Summary

On the construction site for Cedar Gates Conference Center (CGCC), Dutch comes into contact with some black slime coming up from the newly broken ground. He hallucinates that Bob (who’s wife is sleeping with Dutch) and several others are chasing him down in bulldozers until he trips and is impaled on some exposed rebar—his death attributed to drinking. One year later: An ecological conference is being held at the newly opened CGCC, led by the Episcopalian priest Father Douglas Middleton. He meets CGCC manager Symes and event coordinator Khali Spence. Middleton’s friend and keynote speaker Eugene Herman, is practicing his speech in the woods nearby, when he is pulled into a pit of slime and suffocated by an unseen creature. The next day Middleton alerts Khali to his friends disappearance so CGCC Chief of Security, Jackson Deadmarsh, and her check Eugene’s room. They find Reggie and Hank (maintenance men), searching for an undiscovered pipe blockage that has been causing hotel-wide problems, but they haven’t seen Eugene. Deadmarsh and his assistant, Tony, search the woods and eventually find Eugene's body, his face badly contorted and disfigured.

Meanwhile, Middleton searches elsewhere due to his troubled history with Deadmarsh and encounters Mikaela Strovsky, an entitled celebrity/model, who is running after her dog, Cleopatra. She is covered in the black slime and tells the hotel staff to find her dog so she can return to her room to clean up and record a vlog. While recording, she hallucinations an old, eyeless woman in her room's mirror's and eventually smashes them all, violently cutting her wrists. Manuela, a housekeeping employee, finds Mikaela dead in her room and her death is labeled a suicide. Symes forbids Khali from calling the police right away and she eventually comes in contact with some black slime herself. She hallucinates she's being chased by the dog that attacked her as a child and she tries to use her grandmother's necklace for protection but Middleton wakes her from the hallucination, revealing the dog to only be Cleopatra. It's revealed in a flashback Khali's necklace was blessed with a prayer from the Ojibwe, her grandmother's people. Reggie and Hank enter the sewers under CGCC where they find a massive growth of black slime that eats them both. Father Middleton and Khali encounter Dr. Connolly, who’s now living in the woods and continuing his research into the slime. He believes it’s a single organism with a hive mind, comparing it to an ant colony, that has attacked when its habitat was threatened by the building of the CGCC, but this organism can reproduce at alarming rates.

Back at hotel, Deadmarsh views the vlog that Mikaela was recording and sees a slime covered creature crawl out of her bathtub as she’s smashing the mirrors. He and Tony go into the sewers to look for Reggie and Hank. Symes is livid that all the guests of CGCC are evacuating themselves but begins hallucinating when he comes into contact with the slime. He follows Deadmarsh and Tony into the sewers and tries attacking them, but Tony shoots him. Tony and Deadmarsh are both slimed by this point and Tony hallucinates that Symes comes back to life. Deadmarsh finds his body as Connolly, Middleton, and Khali enter the sewer and find him. Together, they find Reggie and Hank's body and discover the slime is starting to seal up all exits. Deadmarsh sacrifices himself so the others can escape, setting aflame the methane leaking out from the sewer walls after the others are behind a sealed metal door. They come across the heart of the creature including its mouth and Connolly falls into it. Middleton saves Khali as she is about to fall in and she is able to use her grandmother's necklace to calm the creature by reciting the Ojibwe prayer. They escape and Middleton reconnects with Khali at the ambulance and confesses his hallucination was that she fell into the creature and died. He asks her to leave with him on his next mission and she agrees; they kiss.

Cast

• Kevin Sorbo — Father Douglas Middleton
• Gordon Tanner — Symes, the manager of Cedar Gates Conference Center (CGCC)
• Natalie Brown — Khali Spence, events coordinator for Cedar Gates Conference Center; her grandmother was Ojibwe and she wears her necklace supposedly traditional Anishinaabe
• Paige Bannister — Aimee, Khali's assistant
• Peter MacNeill — Jackson Deadmarsh, CGCC Head of Security; was a former chief of police in Oregon but was involved in a scandal when Father Middleton sued him for the wrongful arrest and eventual execution of a young Native American man on false evidence
• Blake Taylor — Reggie, head maintenance for CGCC
• Tom Keenan — Hank, Reggie's assistant
• Brittany Scobie — Mikaela Strovsky, a stuck-up celebrity/model attending the conference for the clout of being an environmentalist; "last month's cover of Vogue"
• Frank Adamson — Lowell Kent, the property developer for Cedar Gates Conference Center, bound to a wheelchair and on oxygen
• Brendan Beiser — Dr. Connolly, a scientist who warns Kent of the dangers of building on the grounds
• Brett Donahue — Tony, Deadmarsh's assistant
• Rob McLaughlin — Eugene Herman, keynote speaker for the conference; severely asthmatic
• Gene Pyrz — Jim Bailey
• Tracey Nepinak — Khali's Grandmother
• Aimee Cadorath — Young Khali
• Kevin Aichele — Dutch, a construction worker and the first victim of the slime though his death is labeled an accident
• Mike Bell — Construction Foreman
• Brandon Doty — Backpacking Hippie
• Lindsay Embroyle — Paramedic
• David Stuart Evans — Clerk
• Craig Matthews — Hard Hat
• Kyle Nobess — Sheik Abdula
• Thanya Romero — Manuela, a young housekeeping employee for CGCC
• Tanakh — Ajax
• Karl Thordarson — Mr. Briggs
• Julia Van de Spiegle — Woman in the mirror (from Mikaela's hallucination)
• David Winning — Beast in the Woods / Angry Arab guest / TV-announcer

Production

The movie was filmed in Winnipeg, Manitoba in November 2006. In a 2007 FearNet interview, Sorbo described it as “sort of a flip back to the ‘50s creature films.”

Release

The film premiered on 26 April 2007 as part of the Houston Film Festival and was than chapter of the Rhode Island International Film Festival on 11 August 2007.

Critical reception

As of June 6, 2018 there are no critic reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. The audience rating at Rotten Tomatoes is 7% of 719 liked it.

Home media

The film was released on DVD by RHI Entertainment on September 9, 2008 and produced for television originally by Genius Entertainment.

It was released on DVD in Germany February 25, 2010, under the title “Endstation: Angriff aus dem Untergrund”."

External links

• Official website
• Something Beneath at IMDb