Well Done "Butch" Female Homage to "Deliverance"

Rating: 9/10 (24 November 2006)

This time the explorers in trouble really do have "purdy mouths." This movie is about what happens when a group of six (not four) thrill seeking (but inexperienced and unprepared) upper middle class professional women (not men) find out rather bluntly what happens when they "git in there" in those Appalachian Mountains, USA, they don't respect properly, and then "cain't git out." As much as I wanted to say this movie is derivative, I "cain't." It's well done despite having its influences show, at times, very deliberately and overtly. Before I "git" to the big cinematic homage this movie makes, a few words about the uncredited literary inspiration for it: the novel "The Descent," by Jeff Long. The screenwriter adapted this book just obliquely enough to avoid any successful copy write or unfair usage lawsuits (assuming Long was not paid anything), but if you have read the novel (I did four years ago), you know this movie likely would not exist in its actual realized form if that nook had not been published. Long's work is more epic in scope and globe-trotting in its setting than this movie, and the book's plot details are different, including a bizarre scene where female cave mutants surface, waylay and sexually ravage a pubescent boy, then rip off the hapless kid's penis during a frenzied effort to "revive" him once he is "exhausted." The reason I mention that little, almost seemly incidental item from Long's thick book is that this movie is completely devoid of anything like that. The movie's horror elements are raw, direct, and not in the least campy. Changing Jeff Long's plot around by making it into a powerful re-imagining of James Dickey's "Deliverance," and then avoiding the most obvious homage it could pay to it (a homage that was a central, not incidental part of Dickey's masculine work, but would destroy "The Descent") is what makes this movie work so well.
There is an opening sequence of the women rafting down a whitewater river somewhere in Britain (right hand driving shown), not in canoes, but in big "tourist guide" style rubber rafts. This establishes an immediate and direct link to its predecessor, without any lengthy exposition to bog down the plot. The women are obviously weekend thrill seekers (whitewater) but not overly skilled at what they do (rubber rafts). Tragedy follows thrills when one woman's family is killed in a nasty car accident after they have picked her up at the river take out point. Flash quickly to the following year when the sextet meet again for their annual adventure, this time somewhere in "Appalachian Mountains, USA." More specifically, according to a highway road sign, in the fictional "Chattooga National Park (hummm)." There is a brief flurry of bad jokes among the women about hoedowns and some nondescript banjo music on the radio in one of the two SUVs (as in "Deliverance" there are two vehicles) while the group wends its way deeper into the mountainous forest. One of the women, the leader, jokes about not having been lost in her life.
Instead of rafting, the danger device here is spelunking. The leader conveniently and deliberately chooses to leave the cave guidebook behind in the glove compartment just as leader Burt refused directions to the river thirty-four years ago. To do anything else would defeat the point of it all, right? There is no need to take the book anyway, because the cave they are going in isn't even in it. Needless to say, once underground, the women do get "lost" in many ways, and encounter serious troubles brought on both by their arrogance and lack of caving experience. One woman has a serious accident that results in a nasty surface leg break, complete with protruding bone (sound familiar?), and they of course encounter rather disgusting "locals" down there. Inbred these cave dwellers no doubt are, but they are more like Jeff Long's more extreme example of parallel hominid evolution than James Dickey's sociopathic rednecks. There is a sequence where one of the women falls down a pit into a pool of water and "embraces" a prone cave dweller, but with a nicely different result than in the similar incident with John Voight and the toothless man at the base of Tallulah Gorge.
"Deliverance" is everywhere in this movie, except refreshingly in the one place where it indeed should not be. You just knew, going in, that at least one of those women would have to be, uh, "violated," by these cave critters right? Nine out of ten Hollywood based American hack screenwriters and directors would have played it that way of course, and the movie would have fallen apart. It doesn't happen here, and that could be due to yet another parallel to "Deliverance." Both movies were made by British directors, John Boorman in the original case, Neil Marshall of "Dog Soldiers" notoriety doing this movie.
"Deliverance" was filmed on location in Appalachia. "The Descent" was not. It was filmed as a UK original release movie in Scotland and England. I am not sure exactly where in Scotland (if anyone knows, email me the specifics) the "Appalachia" sequences were filmed, but for a production company restricted to Britain (I am assuming because of budget) they did very well in picking their shooting locales. They avoided the usual treeless highland moors that wouldn't pass for the Blue Ridge or Cumberland Plateau. The fall landscape that did use (oak and maple leaves on the ground in thickly wooded karsty terrain) sort of does look like the Southeastern Mountains of the USA, yet not exactly (too many evergreens along the roadway). In this lushly wooded part of Scotland substituting for Southern Appalachia, the surreal misty intro is yet even more evocative of its inspiration.
Go see it. If you like adventure movies, or horror movies that build on their inspiration without being a simple rehash of old tricks and clichés, you won't be disappointed.