The Descent (2005)

Filed Under BBT Magazine, Insane People, Soylent Screen, Jef Taylor, CHUD.com, broken bones, Gollum, horror, Eyes pecked out

 

BBT critic Jef Taylor goes spelunking for a good horror movie and gets more than he bargained for!

 

With Dog Soldiers, director Neil Marshall proved that he can scare the crap out of us with really foolish looking wolf masks.  Imagine what he could do with the very real life scariness of exploring, and getting trapped in, a cave.  There wouldn’t  even have to be monsters in it for it to be really terrifying.   But there are.
In The Descent, a group of friends decide to re-bond after a horrific accident that ruined one woman’s life.  Her family’s car tragically drifted into the path of the Final Destination series, resulting in a shocking and entertainingly unlikely loss of life.  To cheer her up, her friends decide to meet up and do something really dangerous.  In fact, the one friend who was sleeping with her since-impaled husband is the ringleader of this circus.  Instead of the well-traversed, safe for weekend adventuring, "people might find you if you die" cave, she secretly brings them to the only recently discovered, very unsafe, filled with cannibal troglodytes, "no one will even find the remains of your headlamp" cave.

The remarkable thing about this movie is how scary it is before the boogeymen show up.  The opening scene shows the friends white water rafting, screaming in very authentic sounding terror.  Knowing from reading the dvd label that a bizarre accident wll set the tone, this scene is especially harrowing.  It gets much worse when the women get into the cave.  A ravenous Gollum is simply not as frightening as getting stuck and panicking while chimneying up a narrow cave passage, which happens a scene which I found almost unbearably tense.  When the monsters do show up, it’s actually kind of a relief, as they wrench the movie from adventure realism into fantasy horror.  Not that my wife and I didn’t scream when the creatures first appear, oh we did; but that kind of fear can’t really be compared to the feelings brought on from tense scene of field-dressing a broken bone (the sharp end of which protrudes, in an allusion to Deliverance acknowledged by Marshall) in the dirty and claustrophobic setting of an unwelcoming cave.
If The Descent has a major fault, it’s that it tries to convince us that our heroine is losing her mind, when her psychotic reaction to being trapped in a hole with flesh eating weirdoes seems quite rational.  We’re given her point of view, complete with horrible hallucinations, as she transforms into a combination of Dutch from Predator and Tonya Harding.  It’s an eye-poking, ice-axe swinging good time; kind of a cathartic release until, well, the downer ending.

On the plus side for The Descent is the all-female cast, none of whom are there solely for the prurient enjoyment of ogling male viewers.  I admit, however, that once covered with blood and mud, it became difficult to tell some of the characters apart.  The sets are surprisingly believable, even though they reused many of them on their relatively tight budget.  Best of all was the lighting design, which did the difficult job of convincing the viewer that the only light sources were spelunker’s headlamps without obscuring the important action in complete darkness.  Just the same, I’m not about to enter a cave any time soon, even if I did think there might be some cool monsters down there.

Jef Taylor, though a self-described naturalist, is rarely more than 5 miles from some place he can buy coffee with his bank card.

 

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Comments

2 Responses to “The Descent (2005)”

  1. G-Weir on May 14th, 2008 4:15 am

    Sounds far too intense for my wife’s liking, so I’ll have to begin making elaborate plans to view this without her walking in just when the Most Awful Thing Ever happens, which has happened to us before.

    –G

  2. randall price on May 16th, 2008 7:25 am

    The book by Jeff Long was outstanding, though it had precious little in common with the movie. There’s a hole and there are baddies in it… that’s as far as the similarities go.

    That said, the movie is excellent and genuinely creepy, far superior to ‘The Cave’. And though it’s about a pack of sexy women on an adventure weekend, the sexiness lasts about as long as the batteries in their flashlights, so don’t get it for titillation.

    Heehee, I still can’t say titillation without laughing…

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