not even half de(s)cent.

Rating: Null/10 (2 October 2005)

The descent: I'm afraid (not of the film) but of the fact that this wasn't even half de(s)cent. What starts as a normal low budget British horror soon turns in to a low budget British horror with American sensibilities. The main character starts off as a gibbering widow who also lost her baby in the same accident as her husband and ends up like a cross between Bruce Willis in die-hard and Carrie. From a middle-aged schoolteacher (or whatever she is) who is rubbish at pot holing to a blood-soaked, axe-wielding monster slayer who is f-ing ace at everything. It is just a little too much. Sure enough when the film starts and these six friends (shame it wasn't the cast of friends!) go underground into what they all believe is a series of easy climbs, it's o.k. a little boring but o.k. Except one of the party has taken them somewhere no one has ever been before, a series of uncharted caves. Then as the unsuspecting team lower themselves in to smaller and smaller caves and tunnels the tension starts to build. Thing is it's still not scary, I guess if you are claustrophobic then you might be breathing a little heavier than everyone else but only in the same way that someone with a fear of clowns might not particularly enjoy 'bobo's big top adventure with the clown quartet'. The jumps are there but obvious and despite the fact your in a dark cave you can see them a mile off. It is only when the monsters arrive that it really gets silly, they look like a reunion of Gollum's family tree complete with mad uncle and aunt. The thing that lets these creatures down is that they apparently have adapted to hunt like bats using only sound now if you can get around a dark cave in complete silence let me know. At one point our heroine has a flaming torch that the monsters can't see even though it makes more noise than all six screaming women put together. From the outset of this expedition gone wrong it's a race to find a way out before the creatures get them and that's it. There is a sub-plot about one of the girls having a bit with one of the others husband but it's so thin it's almost as transparent as the monsters skin tissue. Before seeing this film I was expecting a kind of Blair Witch/Most Haunted vibe with cameras on green night-vision and fuzzy screens in the atmospheric underground. What we got was a poor excuse for a gore-fest in a cave. Empire gave this film 5 stars, well if that's what a leading film magazine thinks of this p#ss-poor pot holing parody then I'm sorry but I won't be able to trust their judgement on anything ever again.