Every year there are a hundred excellent movies that go unnoticed because they're drown out by the drunken shouting and hollering of the Hollywood productions, intoxicated by their bid budgets and uncaring of whom they crush in their stumbling and soil with their projectile vomiting. One of the many critically acclaimed but financially foiled films that suffered this kind of treatment last year was The Descent, a low key (and no, not "Loki" for you Norsemen out there) horror flick that managed to spook the shit out of many of the folks who actually made the effort to see it. It's been called the scariest movie since Alien by... uhm... I don't know, look over to the left at the posters and see if you can read it yourself. Anyway, that's a pretty big claim to make, especially for those of you who have read my review for Alien and know of my love for Ridley Scott's outer space spook opus. After seeing The Descent, can I stand by this other reviewer's claim? No.
In no way is The Descent a bad movie. If it were I wouldn't have rated it as high as I did, obviously. The movie follows five friends who go on an "X-treme" ladies-only weekend out to the woods for some girl-on-girl bonding time. Their X-Game of choice is spelunking, so the girls jump down an otherwise unexplored crater to be the first ones to discover, map and name this secret middle-of-nowhere cavern. Of course nothing can ever go right in these situations, so a cave-in leaves the crew trapped and in a desperate search for another way out of the hardest to escape network since I discovered the cell phone contract I signed up for came with a 75 year commitment and the promise to present the severed heads of 12 kung-fu grand masters to Virgin Mobile before the setting of the sun on my 31st birthday.
To make this something a little more dramatic than your typical "friends lost in the woods" weekend warrior nightmare type movie, the women need something more supernatural than depleted water, dying batteries and personal injury to overcome. This is where the nest of wall-climbing sub-humanoid albino creepies (of which every trailer park in the south will resemble given another 6 or 7 generations of rampant Jerry Springer inbreeding) with a taste for flesh and a radar sense come in! Yeah, you had to figure something like that would be coming along sooner or later.
This flick is just rough enough around the edges to give it that "indie" charm, but slick enough to make it look professional. With a relatively small cast of no-names and a crew that's yet to make a name for themselves in the movie biz, you don't go into it expecting a lot and that just heightens the impact of what we wind up with. Don't get me wrong, I'm not just saying that this movie's good for a low-budget outing, I'm saying it's good for any kind of outing, period! The fact that it had no pretense or hype to carry it and the movie had to build what it has for itself from the ground up jush makes it that much more impressive for what it is. I've literally sat through a good thousand or so horror movies in the last decade from all times and places, so I became desensitized to violence and had the concept of "suspense" ruined for me long ago. Because of this, The Descent's gore, intensity and sensations of horror and "will she make it or will she die?!" didn't have the full impact on me, but I'm willing to admit there were still a couple moment of cringing and a genuine "Holy shit!" moment or two that actually caught me off guard! I consider this no small feet.
Now, is it the next Alien? No. You can't blame it for trying, but the terror and hopelessness of Alien don't transfer so much here when you realize that the glorified relatives of Bat Boy are a lot easier to kill than a phallus-headed Xenomorph death machine. It's less intimidating when you realize that your pursuer can't see you if you just stop moving and can be easily removed from the picture with a rock pick to the back of the head, though I have to admit that it leads to a lot more of the red stuff to play with. As far as the cast goes, nobody stands out as the next big b-movie break-out starlet here. However, though nobody makes a case for themselves to be earning a Hollywood paycheck any time soon, I do applaud the writers, not for their generic "people trapped together must fight for their life" story but for the characterizations and the mental breakdown of Sarah, our lead, through the movie's last stretch. Sure, it's become cliché for the lead female to turn from a tit mouse into She-Rambo over the course of a few reels, but if it's done with enough zeal (like, say, having her emerge from a pool of viscera to seek blood soaked revenge?) and the way she goes all the way with giving in to her madness, it doesn't feel so much like something we've seen so many otherwise "pretty" and vulnerable young ladies descend through before. And there we have it: the double meaning for our title.
I recommend The Descent. I hate to be the type who has to say this kind of thing after everybody else already has, but it's definitely one of the best horror efforts I've seen come along in recent memory and deserves a spot on your DVD shelf... unless you can't sit still for two hours watching a movie with an all female cast unless they're soaping up each other's boobs in the shower or shooting at each other while jumping around in slow motion... not that there's anything wrong with that, so long as you realize there's more to life than just tits and firearms. Yay movies!
