when you can anticipate every scare in a scary movie, it stops being scary

Rating: 6/10 (4 August 2006)

The Descent reviewed by Sam Osborn
rating: 2 out of 4
The Descent is a film about the things that go bump in the night. Only, in a cave it's always night and the things that go bump also slither, crawl, leap, tear, and munch on your very intestines. It's a well-trodden formula and one with great potential. But in my history with the oft-attempted premise there hasn't yet been a film that does it justice. The Descent looked promising though, coming straight out of the U.K. after having garnered $5 million and a strong following on DVD release. The preview had grit under its fingernails and blood in its mouth, not to mention that the trailer was scarier than hell. But that's just it: the scene that scared us in the preview is the scariest stunt The Descent manages to pull. Too bad. But don't blame the marketing guys for the film's failure. Writer/Director Neil Marshall opens up the throttle much too wide much too early and leaves little to scare us with after his initial big reveal. The monsters are unveiled without tact and wasted on the paces of a by-the-books creature feature that fails to find its way beneath our skin.
The story's no surprise, following a group of spelunkers who are struck by coincidental disaster and forced to find an alternate route out of the cave they've burrowed into. Our spelunkers (heh, I've always loved that word) are a flock of English women venturing into the Appalachian Mountains. The opening sequence tells of a brutal tragedy that befell our main spelunker, Sarah (Shauna MacDonald,) setting up a theme that is continually haunting throughout the film. Juno (Natalie Mendoza), the group's leader, wants the girls' trip to the Appalachians to be her gift to Sarah, attempting to bring her back to their old days of adventuring, before Sarah lost her family. But the gift turns to a curse when Sarah starts hearing the mellifluous giggles of her dead daughter's laugh behind the dark corners of the cave. She thinks she sees something out there in the darkness, something moving. But, of course, no one believes her, and it's only when she captures footage of the thing on camera (the scene revealed in the trailer) that Sarah's fellow spelunkers start taking her seriously. There is something down in the deep, and it wants to eat them.
Too bad the creatures, the deadly flesh-eating monsters, look like the lovechild of Gollum and the Orcs from Lord of the Rings. The likeness is simply uncanny. And similarities like these are too distracting to miss and when caught, too difficult to shake. But in truth, the creatures are supposed to be an evolved form of regular old human, created from generations of life in the deep dark. The story tells of a group of spelunkers from hundreds of years ago trapped in the same cave as our ladies. They apparently managed to survive and reproduce, growing traits fit for cave life and avoiding discovery until Juno and her group of spelunkers tumbled in. For me, this tale of the original spelunkers from hundreds of years back, their rapid evolution and inhuman adaptation would be a more interesting story weave than the tired junk Neil Marshall throws at us.
His film plays its cards too early. Instead of pulling us along on whispers from the shadows and footsteps in the deep, he throws the lights on first chance he gets and takes the next exit to Slasher-ville. The cave setting all but begs for psychological head games where unseen creatures are more terrifying than those that look like the bastard child of Gollum. But Marshall quickly resorts to a big reveal and falls back into the ruts grinded already by a dozen creature features and slasher films before it. The scares were already written for him. You know, when the character checks the dark corner and finds its safe, only to turn back and face the ugly mug and fangs of the monster. Or when the heroes sneak down the hallway as quietly as their booted feet can muster and as they pass by camera it's revealed that the creature's hanging above them on the ceiling. Or how about this: the nice, innocent character finds the primal instinct within her and turns into Ms. Rambo-ette, killing machine. These would all be spoilers if dozens of other horror films hadn't already given them away for you. And when you can anticipate every scare in a scary movie, it stops being scary.