A masterpiece in modern horror

Rating: 9/10 (5 August 2006)

"The Descent" is obviously not an American movie. It's got imagination, smarts, and, dare I say it, actual SCARES. Everything the American horror film lacks. The latter is one reason I've stopped watching movies, period. Once a video store clerk licking his chops to see every new release that came in, and every horror movie we carried, I quickly grew bored of watching the same movie over and over again, in which all the characters that should live somehow manage to do so, and vice versa for all the characters that should die.
"The Desscent" is a film in which none of the characters SHOULD die. It also brilliantly nixes the ol' "love tension" cliché that kills so many movies. How so? By filling the entire cast with females. Strong females. These aren't the typical all-they-do-is-scream-and-die women from American horror movies. These are women who fill their free time with white-water rafting, mountain climbing, and anything else that can give them a rush of adrenaline.
To quickly sum up the plot, we follow a group of seven women lead by Juno, a women with perhaps more of a thirst for the extreme than all the others. The women all plan to explore a "level 2" cave, which is a cave of roughly "average" difficulty. Or as one character puts it, "a tourist attraction." But Juno has other things in mind. Before you know it, the characters are exploring an unnamed, unexplored cave that may or may not even have a way out.
That's just a rough summary of the plot. If you want more, you can read virtually every other review on this film. But what I want to focus on are the scares. Oh God are there scares. I am not a person easily fazed by horror films, basically for the reason above (that all of them follow simple formulas that, once known, give away the entire movie). "The Descent" follows very few formulas. Since all the characters are strong, you really have no idea which ones will die, and which ones will live. You can't easily guess where scares will pop up. There's one brilliant scene (don't worry, I won't give it away) where you KNOW for a fact something's coming, and you think you know exactly when, and you're wrong. So you start to relax. Then it finally comes, jerking you out of your seat and sending your heart-rate through the roof.
"The Descent" is a brilliant film, though not without flaws. Though I realize the darkness is for atmosphere's sake (and it works for the most part), there are a few times when it becomes difficult to tell who's who, once the females separate, simply because you can't see their face. It's also tough to tell what's going on during the "struggle" sequences between the characters and the creatures, which leads me to another complaint: The creatures look like Golem extras from "The Lord of the Rings". They are creepy-looking, but the one way the movie could have been even better...well nearly perfect, is if the creatures were never shown in whole.
As it stands, however, "The Descent" is a modern masterpiece in horror, a film that would theoretically make that perfect first date movie--except there's the good chance that the boy, who's seen every horror movie and, like me, has figured out the formulas, might also be clinging to the girl by the end.