Creepy, Claustrophobic and Nasty...

Rating: 8/10 (3 August 2010)

"The Descent" is a movie I've been wanting to get my hands on for quite awhile now. It had received near-universal positive reviews over the past few years and I was curious to see if it would live up to the hype. The answer is YES, it does, and in spades. "The Descent" is one of the creepiest, darkest, nastiest little movies I've seen in quite some time.
The setup is pretty simple: a group of women who enjoy extreme sports/adventuring start out the movie on a white water rafting trip. On their way home from that trip, Sarah (our eventual heroine) loses her husband and young daughter in a head-on car crash. A year later, the still-grieving Sarah meets up with the group again for a new adventure, this time exploring a cave in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Things start to go bad for the group virtually from the get-go. After crawling through a number of tight tunnel passages, a cave-in traps them underground, at which point "Juno" (the organizer of the trip) reveals to her friends that the cave they're in is not the one they originally intended to visit, but an unmapped cave that she wanted to "be the first" to explore. Therefore no one knows they're down there, and their only hope is to find another exit from the cave system. If you think it can't get any worse than that, well, you're wrong. One of the girls eventually breaks her leg falling down a hole and from there, well, everything hits the fan, as they encounter a race of pale, toothy, humanoid creatures with a taste for human flesh. From there all bets are off as the gang struggles to survive against the creatures -- and each other -- long enough to find a way out from the cave.
The main strength of "The Descent" is how it builds slowly; in fact we don't even see the creatures (dubbed "crawlers," though I kept thinking of them as "C.H.U.D.'s") until the film is more than half over. The first hour is scary enough without them, as the girls squeeze through holes in the rock in near-total darkness, occasionally getting stuck, fighting amongst themselves as the stress of the situation begins to get to them, etc. Eventually a revelation pits Juno and Sarah (the two last surviving girls) against one another in a bleak finale that will stick with you long after the film is over.
"The Descent" is one of those movies that actually works better on a TV screen, as long as you're in a dark room; it heightens the film's claustrophobic vibe. Make sure you pick up the "uncut, unrated" DVD, which contains the original ending from the British release of the film, rather than the truncated/fake "happy" ending of the American version.
Monster movie fans can pick up "The Descent" with confidence. Those with claustrophobia or fear of the dark should probably pass on it.