The Hole

Directed by Joe Dante. Starring Teri Polo, Haley Bennett, Bruce Dern, Chris Massoglia, Nathan Gamble, Quinn Lord 15A cert, gen release, 92 min

EVERY NOW and then you come across a film that reminds you of a vanished genre: a class of entertainment that slipped away without anyone noticing. We're talking here about that school of family-friendly horror – the likes of Poltergeistand Gremlins– that enlivened Saturday afternoons during the 1980s.

One of the key forces was the admirable Joe Dante, who returns here with a very amusing late addition to the movement. All the tropes of the first wave are here. As in so many Spielberg projects, the film revolves around a family without a man at its helm.

A mum and her two sons, constant travellers, arrive in yet another new home. Disturbed by some concealed family trauma, the boys bicker until – heads both turned – they run into an attractive female neighbour. She is full of tales of strange happenings in the area (why that mad fellow at the

old factory sounds a bit like Bruce Dern), but, more assured than her new friends, encourages adventures into the unknown.

Events turn properly peculiar when the pals encounter a trapdoor in the family’s basement. They wrench it open and discern that it opens onto an apparently bottomless space. Later, scary things emerge.

The Holeis shot in stupid 3D and, an expert in 1950s cinematic ephemera, Joe Dante probably does something quite amusing with the process. Unfortunately, as is so often the case these days, the images are so dark it's hard to tell.

Never mind. A gorgeous little symphony of shocks and shudders, quietly insightful about family dynamics, The Holeconfirms that proper scares and real intimations of existential gloom can sit quite comfortably in films intended for (pretend I never used this grisly phrase) All The Family.

The Holeis certainly not up to the standard of major Dante projects such as Small Soldiersor the Gremlinsfilms. Indeed, in scale and tone it seems closest to the director's fine episode in Twilight Zone: The Movie. It is, however, as much fun as anything else in cinemas this season. So treat that overly harsh 15A cert with scepticism and bring (one more shudder) All The Family.