Time Trap

This professor finds a long abandoned van with flowers painted all over it, and then a cave with a gunfighter frozen just a few feet in. Lacking any common sense, he ventures into the cave alone. When he doesn't return, two of his grad students, Taylor and Cara, go looking for him.

Since they lack an appropriate vehicle, they ask another friend to drive them in her dad's jeep. Since they lied about where they were going and what they were doing, the girl's mother insists her younger sister be allowed along, and then this other, pre-adolescent boy the younger sister knows somehow gets to go along, and continuously be a creep towards Cara.

They find a cave, leave the boy outside, and head in. At which point everything goes to hell. The rope they used to descend to a lower cavern breaks. They try to call the boy (called Furby, poor kid), and hear some creepy, anguished voice replying. People venture into other sections of the caverns for long periods of time, but claim they were only gone for seconds.

Then they find one cavern with a hole to the outside at the top, and a curious strobe effect going on in the sky. They also find Furby, dead on the floor of the cavern. Things continue to go downhill, because there are time shenanigans going on in these caverns.

I don't think that qualifies as a spoiler. The title of the movie is "Time Trap", not exactly subtle.

The characters spend what feels like a lot of time watching videos recorded on phones and cameras they're wearing, to establish to themselves that time is moving weirdly in here. It probably isn't that long, but damn it feels like it takes a long time to get beyond everyone being befuddled to everyone being freaked out, which is at least louder and potentially more interesting. I think the fact the audience is so far ahead of the characters in figuring crap out hamstrings things.

The most interesting part to me was the spaceman fighting the cavemen, which reminded me of that episode of Angel where they argue through the entire show about who would win a fight between cavemen and astronauts. The answer, based on this is, the astronaut if it's one on one, the caveman if they have a 3-to-1 advantage. Although this may hinge on the spaceman being from a period of time when humans have evolved to be 8 feet tall, and on cavemen being short and kind of skinny. I'm not sure what happens if you decrease the size disparity.

The ending is. . . something, I'll say that.