weak

Rating: 1/10 (17 May 2006)

To call this film dull would be the equivalent of calling Hussain slightly unpleasant. It is my firm belief that if you were to conduct an experiment whereby one subject would snort five lines of cocaine and the other would watch "The Descent" the person who had taken the coke would walk away with more brain cells still intact.
The 'acting' is truly atrocious; as the film was beginning I had a wonderful nostalgia trip back to the old Nativity plays we used to perform at Primary school every Christmas.
Anyway, the film begins simply enough with a family driving through the country when they are involved in a car accident resulting in an over elaborate death for the husband and daughter of the lead character. We are then treated to a hospital scene with enough green filter to make the Wachowski brothers vomit with rage. The lead character has a breakdown and then quickly gets over the loss of her family.
Soon afterwards we meet her supermodel friends who are all supposedly rough ad rugged rock climbers; it is more likely however that their idea of an adventure would be going shopping for dresses. These extremely beautiful women all stay in a log cabin together and drink beer while hugging an awful lot, all we need is a nice pillow fight and we're sorted. Unfortunately there is no pillow fight, but there is a nice unnecessary scene of a woman showering. Lovely! The women then spend a good hour in the cave where nothing actually happens! Seriously, nothing happens for an entire sixty minutes! After an entire gruelling hour we are "treated" to an attack made by the monsters, where have I seen this before? Ah yes "Creep" another poor horror film, but it came first and the scene in "Creep" where you first see the monster is genuinely quite scary, the revealing of the creatures in "The Descent" however, is pathetic.
In fact, while I'm on the subject of "Creep", the monsters in this film are absolute rip-offs of Craig, not only do they resemble him, but they make identical noises and move in a fairly similar manner. Both films are about being trapped in the dark in someone else's territory, the only difference is Christopher Smith can actually direct a film whereas Neil Marshall has no real skill as a filmmaker whatsoever! Everything I saw in this film, I have seen a thousand times before, executed a thousand times better! I have absolutely nothing good to say for it.
Recent horror films are, on the whole, dreadful. If you want to see what a REAL horror film looks like then watch "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or "Ringu"