Have we been here before . . . ?

Rating: 4/10 (23 August 2010)

Neil Marshall comes up with an idea for a horror film, and once again it smacks of everything from Deliverance to Alien, with more than a little Hammer horror for good measure.
The Descent is not a bad film, it's just completely unoriginal as, it seems, are all Marshall's films. The film starts with a clip of an accident, which I think involves a child dying. A year later the narrative picks up with six women uniting for a bonding trip as they go potholing. The mother of the dead child is on board, as well as one of the women who is, I think, subconsciously blamed for the accident. Either way, one of these women has 'issues' which you just know are going to come to a head at some point in a 'big scene' involving a confrontation and a few home truths.
Talking of truths, whenever I watch a Marshall movie I always get the sense I am watching a soap opera. Something like EastEnders. In other words something that tends to repeat itself over and over again.
After watching Dog Soldiers it confirmed my suspicion that Marshall, not unlike Wes Craven, is a man who can take an interesting premise and absolutely slaughter it up on the screen; and no, that's not a compliment, even though a horror director might take it as one.
Put simply The Descent is merely a mishmash of other horror films. There is a little of Deliverance in here - city types lost amid the wilderness - and a little bit of Alien - a group of people picked off one by one by a largely unseen monstrous entity, but The Descent never gets anywhere near the emotional impact of either of those two films. After watching Alien for an hour I felt like I knew the crew of the Nostromo; sadly, after watching this particular film I couldn't even SEE who was down in the cave, much less care about whether they lived or not.
Going by the other reviews on IMDb it seems Neil Marshall has his fair share of fans. Good luck to him, but on this evidence I simply can't see what the fuss is about. Perhaps next time someone should switch the lights on.