Overall Rating
  Awesome: 63.28%
Worth A Look: 15.25%
Just Average: 14.12%
Pretty Crappy: 5.65%
Sucks: 1.69%
13 reviews, 99 user ratings
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| Descent, The |
by Matt Seaver
"This is what survival horror should be."
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“The Descent” is the perfect set-up for a horror movie. It starts out with the now-tired formula – six attractive women doing something dangerous. It takes a normal twist – one of them makes a seriously misguided error. Something bad happens – they’re trapped, with no way out, and no way to get help. This is normally the part where the killer/monster/virus/insane clown slaughters them all, one by one. But in most horror movies, the villain never has to deal with anyone who kicks nearly this much ass.The story, for what it’s worth, revolves around Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), a young woman who’s dealt with way too much trauma in her young life. Year(s) earlier, Sarah was in a car accident that left her husband and her young daughter dead, something from which she still hasn’t fully recovered. As an attempt to further that recovery, she’s meeting five friends in the woods in America to go cave diving. They’ve always had a good time with this sort of thing, and it seems like just the right move to get Sarah back into life. Led by Juno (Natalie Mendoza), they arrive at camp for the night to drink and prep for the day ahead. There we see a little more of Sarah’s fractured emotional state, through her nightmares about the deaths of her family.
The next day, they head out for the entrance to the cave they’re going to explore. At first, it’s all more or less fun and easy, nothing the girls can’t handle. But when squeezing through a particularly tight passage, Sarah gets stuck and starts to freak out. Beth (Alex Reid) tries to help her through it and rejoin the others, difficult in the claustrophobic tunnel.
And then the damn thing starts to collapse.
They race out and regroup, now realizing that the entrance they came through has been sealed shut. It’s OK, because there are other entrances to the cave system they were talking about exploring… oops. We’re not in that cave system! Juno switched it last minute in order to make the trip more exciting, so that they could “discover” this system together and have a truly unique experience. Needless to say, this pisses everyone off, and the friendships start to strain under such a high-pressure situation.
And then they hear something. And see something. And it wants them out of its cave.
This is the flow of The Descent, done in brilliant fashion. Everything goes from fine to terrible in a matter of minutes – there’s no release before the tension builds again; every possible bad thing gets dumped on these women within a ten minute span. Writer/director Neil Marshall has no issue showing EXACTLY how bad this is getting, either. This is one of the most cringe-worthy horror films I’ve seen in some time, and not just for “the big scares.” In fact, more cringes come from real life injuries, accidents that put something outside the human body that has no reason to be outside the body. It’s gross, and really, really effective.
The film is almost too tightly written, giving the exact amount of exposition needed for the audience to understand who these people are and how they know each other. After that’s out of the way, he starts throwing problems at them, and doesn’t really let up until the very end. There are a few moments at the end of the film where conflicts take the worst possible turn for the remaining women, worse than anything that had hit them previously. It’s so well orchestrated that you lose the fact that the film’s been running on adrenaline for an hour and that the story thus far has been somewhat thrown out the window until it suddenly pops back up in a very decisive way.
It’s very well shot as well. It looks good, although a little generic, while the women are at camp above ground. Marshall really starts to have fun once they get in the caves, though, with great open chamber shots including stalactites and stalagmites, dramatic angles, and shots preceding them through very tight tunnels. There are times where he lets his red filter go a little bit crazy, but given the situation, I can’t blame him.
I don’t want to say too much about them, because too much would spoil the priceless first appearance, but the inhabitants of this cave are scary as all hell, and fun to watch. The fights barely looked choreographed, they’re so frantic and desperate, both on the parts of the women and on the parts of the “crawlers” who only know one way to deal with this invasion.I haven’t been scared like that since… I don’t even know. After proving right away that he’s not going to mess around, Marshall builds his anticipation so well, and teases the audience for the first half hour in the cave. When the payoff finally comes, it’s serious. I admire the fact that he took a pretty standard horror formula – women attacked by monsters – but didn’t put in a man to save them, and made his heroines far from helpless. This is an awesome film to watch with people, if only to see their reactions. Just don’t forget that you’ll probably be making plenty of your own as well.
link directly to this review at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=12642&reviewer=412
originally posted: 09/06/06 10:40:20
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 Sundance Film Festival For more in the 2006 Sundance Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 Philadelphia Film Festival For more in the 2006 Philadelphia Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 San Francisco Film Festival For more in the 2006 San Francisco Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 Fantasia Film Festival For more in the 2006 Fantasia Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
04-Aug-2006 (R)
DVD: 26-Dec-2006
UK
08-Jul-2005
Australia
23-Nov-2006
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