Product: The Descent (Original Unrated Cut) [Blu-ray] (2006)
Rating: 4.0
Wonderful, right up until...
The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)Here's the big letdown of The Descent: the movie gets a whole lot less scary when the bad guys show up. Here's the saving grace: by the time the bad guys show up, you'll probably be too creeped out to care.Marshall (who previously directed the underrated thriller Dog Soldiers) gives us the tale of Sarah (Late Night Shopping's Shauna MacDonald), an extreme-adventure-loving kind of gal, who with her friends and constant companions Beth (Last Orders' Alex Reid) and Juno (Hotel Babylon's Natalie Mendoza), does silly things like go whitewater rafting on rivers that could kill all of them. Her safe, boring husband (Paranoid's Oliver Milburn) and their daughter Jessica (newcomer Molly Kayll) are ironically killed in a car accident, and Sarah has a nervous breakdown. A year later, when she has seemingly recovered, Juno invites her and Beth on a caving expedition in rural North Carolina along with Becka (Saskia Mulder, late of The Beach), Holly (The Magdalene Sisters' Nora-Jane Noone), and Sam (MyAnna Buring, recently of the remake of The Omen). The six of them head off to the cave, and find themselves trapped after a minor earthquake shifts some rock in a narrow tunnel they've just come through. Worse, they find they're not alone...The first half of this movie should probably be avoided by anyone who has claustrophobia issues. It is here that the film's real capacity for fear lies-- in a bunch of people crawling through very small passages with thousands of tons of rock above them. During one particular scene, I was curled up in my seat eating my own hand. (You'll know it when you see it.) It is soon after that that the bad guys show up, and the movie becomes a pretty typical survival thriller, though Marshall does throw in a few twists and turns along the way that, unlike the popping-out-at-you cheap thrills of most survival thrillers, really do hit home on occasion. (Most, unfortunately, have little to do with the bad guys.) The raging exception is the film's final scene, about which I was prepared to rage for most of this review until I found out that about ninety seconds of the original cut of the film was lopped off at the end (the original footage can be seen at YouTube until the DVD shows up, for those interested). Someone in Hollywood needs to lose a job over the loss of those ninety seconds, which entirely change the tone and meaning of the film, tie up at least one major loose end, and add new shades of subtext to the title. If you see the film, hop on YouTube soon after and check out what you missed; without it, the last shot is typical cheap horror-film fare. (And it works that way in the original cut as well, but its impact is considerably lessened by its not being the actual last shot of the film.)I sound like a broken record in today's reviews, but I have to say it again, like I said for Bad Lieutenant and Lifeboat: this is not really a movie about going down into a cave and fighting for your life. This is a movie about characters-- most notably Sarah, but also Juno. It's the way they react to their surroundings, how they come to make the snap decisions they have to make in order to survive, the way the stress of the situation transforms them, that makes this, ultimately, a very worthwhile movie. It's well worth your time.American cut: ***Original cut: ****