The Descent – The Rebirth of the Monster Movie

DVD Review

Who said the British Horror movie scene was, to use a well-carved pun, dead?  With recent releases pulling screams from disenchanted youths on both sides of the Atlantic, that little gem of wisdom couldn’t be further from the truth.  The Hammer franchise might have choked on its own corniness back in the eighties, but there’s a new name in town to make everything alright again. 

Neil Marshall’s second film (his small indie debut, Dog Soldiers, was a massive hit all over the world) sees the theme of unnatural animalistic rage and bloody gore from his first film ratcheted up twenty notches.  Whereas that film relied heavily on black humour and knowing winks to other films in the werewolf genre, this film steers the other way and tries its best to get you screaming from the very beginning.  You won’t get many laughs out of this little fright-fest.

This time, the action takes place in the Appalachian mountains of North America.  Six girls (yes, this is a chick flick with a big difference) hooked on extreme sports and bent on experiencing the ultimate thrill head into an underground cave system and into their worst nightmare.  Deep down in the labyrinthine tunnels, a race of humanoid creatures with a taste for fresh meat have adapted perfectly to their surroundings.  These lithe monsters, totally blind and hunting only by sound, feed on the animals of the forest above, and they can’t believe their luck when this sextuplet of overly-macho lovelies stumbles into their lair.

If you’re expecting unexplained cannibalism ala Wrong turn or Texas Chainsaw, forget it.  Marshall has gone all out to portray his monsters as wild animals, fighting over the juiciest cuts of their prey.  There’s something very ‘Morlock’ from ‘The Time machine’ about these beasts, and it isn’t hard to imagine them evolving and surviving down in the dark for thousands of years.  Their bizarre communicative whooping is truly eerie as it echoes around the caves, and their pale bodies, highlighted only fleetingly for much of the movie, leaves a lot to the terrified imagination.  Even before the monsters show up, (it’s almost a full hour into the film before we see a silhouette of the first creature as it stalks the girls) there are claustrophobic shots of the girls crawling through narrowing potholes and blind alleys.  If you hate tight spaces, you’ll find you have to remind yourself to breathe watching those scenes.

The six girls, although stereotypes of the kind of plucky gals you’d expect to find in this kind of movie, (one is recently bereaved and another has a badly kept secret) they really come into their own when things start to get freaky.  As the frantic confusion builds momentum, and the weakest are picked off, the strongest of the characters seem to realise that in order to beat the wild creatures stalking them, they must become like them.  The scene where the main character, Sarah (a tour de force from Shauna McDonald) stands highlighted by a burning torch, drenched in blood and gore, eyes hard and steely, is scary as hell and reminiscent of Sissy Spacek’s Carrie in the last scenes of the prom.

If you want a good, scary night in with a bucket of popcorn, you could do a lot worse than this.  And even the most jaded horror movie fan won’t be disappointed by the obligatory shock ending.

****/*****