The Descent is a gory, B-movie style horror pic from England. It takes place around and beneath the Appalachian mountains in the southeast US, and stars six adventurous, outdoor-type female friends who get together to spelunk a previously-unexplored cave system. It's a horror movie, so it won't be a surprise when I tell you that bad things happen once they're underground, and that lives are lost, blood is spilled, and weird monsters abound.
It's not a great film, but it's smarter than most horror movies, and the atmosphere is a great element. It really feels like you're in a pitch black, claustrophobic cave along with the six female leads, and I actually enjoyed the movie more in the early going, when they were exploring the cave before the monster movie stuff got going.
The Descent is no masterpiece, but it's an enjoyable, gruesome, exciting thrill ride -- if you like this sort of film. It was made by the guys who did the cult hit
Dog Soldiers, but aside from this one being a lot better than it could have been, I didn't feel much of a connection or continuity between the two low budget horror flicks.
To the scores, which are
explained here.
The Descent, 2006
Script/Story: 4
Characters: 7
Action: 6
Combat Realism: 6
Humor: 2
Horror: 8
Eye Candy: 5
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 6
Overall: 6
The Descent is enjoying some really nice reviews, and those, in part, were what convinced Malaya and me to check it out. With 119 reviews it's
got 82% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, and while we largely avoided those reviews and their attendant spoilers, we knew the basic plot of the film going in. It didn't disappoint; the action was in a cave and the monsters were creepy and there were deaths and scares galore. I was a bit disappointed in the story though, since I'd been led to believe
The Descent was more intelligent and inventive than most horror films.
It's not. The characters react like real people, rather than horror movie victims, but the plot itself is cookie cutter. Attractive young people head off into the boondocks, get trapped somewhere without hope of rescue, get attacked by monsters, fight and run in terror, and mostly die. The basic formula is identical to dozens of other horror movies; what makes this one a bit better is the quality of the acting, writing, and the atmosphere. The direction isn't stylish or
avant garde, but it's solid and accomplished, and the film does a very good job of making you feel trapped far below the surface along with these women.
There's a nice sequence where the women have to crawl through a long, low, narrow passage, down into water and over dirt and gravel, and through it all the camera stays about a foot in front of one woman's face, while moving steadily backwards while she crawls forward. The scene runs for ten or fifteen seconds while the woman covers a good five meters on elbows and knees, and I really don't know how they did it. It's the most authentic cave I've ever seen, and as the camera moves back you can see the floor, walls, and roof of the hose-like tunnel. Did they did a trench in a cave floor and fake the roof? Is it a fake tunnel with a camera on the end of a long pole?
Other scenes use blackness very well, especially early on, when the women have light sources. All you can see is what they see with their headbeams or flares; it's not one of those movies where it's sort of gray and you pretend the characters can't see when they obviously can. Looking down into seemingly-bottomless pits lit only by a few jerking flashlights, or bathed in a lurid red glow from a torch is creepier than most outright scare scenes in most horror movies, and like a good submarine movie, you definitely get the "stuck in a small, deadly space" during
The Descent.
Not everything is great, of course. The opening is a bit slow to get going, with the six women all drinking and hanging out in a cabin during the "get to know the characters" section, and that sort of drags. The characters weren't bad though, no of the unknown actresses were great, but none of them stopped the movie cold, and at least they all looked the part; athletic enough to be believable in their physically-demanding roles. (If not ripped enough to believe some of their rock climbing exploits; there's no way any of them had the arms to do the one-handed pull-ups seen on screen.)
It was also refreshing to have six women and no men, if only to spare us the requisite, "couple attacked while making love in some foolishly public location," and "horny guy walks to his doom thinking the shape in the darkness is his GF," and "guys scream at each other in testosterone-laden pissing contest when under stress," scenes.
While the basic structure was very familiar to the horror genre, there were a lot of fresh ideas, and it was nice that some of the cliches were avoided. Besides the scenes the movie avoided by not having any male leads, (and not substituting lesbian stereotypes for them) the movie also avoided any ominous, toothless, shotgun-caressing backwoods locals, axe-murderers, gratuitous topless shower scenes (I wouldn't have minded that one so much), women pointlessly tripping while running from a slow pursuer, hysterical women who must be slapped to calm them during a moment of stress, and more.
The Descent has every "gotcha" scene in triplicate, where people see nothing, turn around and turn back right into the monster, or think a rock is a rock when it's a monster in wait, or don't look up to see monsters above them, or must lie still so the prowling six inches away won't sense them, etc. But at least the characters don't do annoying and stupid things once the shit starts hitting the fan.
As with most horror films, the characters and acting hardly matter anyway, since after the initial "get to know the victims" bonding stuff they spend the rest of the film struggling to survive. It takes longer than expected to get to that point in
The Descent, and the opening drags a bit, but once they're in the cave, it's all pretty good. I actually enjoyed the "women vs. nature" stuff more than the eventual "women vs. mutated monsters" showdown, but a documentary about spelunking probably wouldn't sell as well without fanged albino monstrosities in the third act.
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