Product: The Descent (Original Unrated Cut) [Blu-ray] (2006)
Rating: 2.0
You've come a long way, Baby
Or, "Geez, is that what they mean by Post Partum Depression?'Neil marshall's spelunk-a-dunk with she-hunks gone terribly wrong has been favorably compared to Aliens, and in one sense it's easy to fathom why: you've got a strong female protagonist (actually, um, all the cavers are chicks, but onward), pitted in a deep, dark, confined space against a shadowy, hungry, and unrelenting Evil.That's about where the similarities end, aside from the hopes of the guys in Marketing---who evidently did their groundwork well & hit the beaches hard for Neil Marshall's follow-up to the blearily gory good-times slaughterfest "Dog Soldiers".Don't believe the Hype. Unless you're easily scared, "Descent" just isn't that big of a deal: basically a bunch of chicks go spelunking in a Big Deep Cave in the mountains of Appalachia, and have a great time getting in touch with their inner caving-chick until some flesh-eating troglodytes come along and start harshing the vibe.But let's back up a bit: Descent's reluctant heroine Sarah (Shauna MacDonald, who does what she has to do with reserve & a stiff upper lip) has had a nasty trauma: her husband and daughter were killed in what is possibly the coollest road accident I've ever seen translated to film, minutes after her group's last escapade: a white-water rafting expedition in Scotland, where she thought---glimpsed, a few scant, fleeting moments of sight enhanced by a woman's intuition---that something just might be going on between her husband and the group's Alpha Female, Juno (deliciously played by Natalie Jackson Mendosa, who can sink her pitons in my futon any time).Six months pass, and Sarah has to get back up on the horse, get back on that stallion girl, head back into the wilds with her former gang. She agrees to go caving with Juno & her caving buds, but none of the women fully grasp the enormity of the challenge against which Juno has pitted the team.They're about to find out.Now look: long before Mark Twain penned that nasty, creepy, claustrophobic chase sequences between Injun Joe & Tom & Becky in the caverns, good solid folks---folks like you, Gentle Reader!---have had a horror, a fair dose of squeam, when it comes to thinking about being trapped beneath the ground, caught, stuck, air running out, darkness flowing down over your face, your mouth, like a mask, a caul, a coffin.Brrrr.Marshall is a fine director when it comes to building up atmosphere, and just as he did in "Dog Soldiers", he builds it here in brilliant little snippets: an ancient climber's piton gouged into the rock, a mouldering miner's helmet left orphaned in the inky black, the chittering and chirruping of something well off in the Dark---just beyond the pass, the turn, the little shaft that curves off to the northeast.I was hooked until the first attack, until the first big creature reveal, and here Marshall falls on his own sword: he's great at building suspense, but lousy at delivering the goods. The cave-troglodytes, however awful---and they're awful, particularly the den-mother who comes sloshing across this swimming-hole of goop & blood and viscera to throttle Sarah---never can compare with what you imagine might be stalking these women, just out of eyeshot, nestled back in the inky black.Worse, once the big attack comes, it's clumsily shot & edited---lessening the tension, rather than ratcheting it up.Step back from the film a second, please: think about the vast, horrible, gigglingly-insanely scary potential of a group of women marooned in an unexplored cave-system, their retreat blocked, the way forward mined and menaced at every turn. Imagine how easy it would be to turn claustrophobia into terror with the tiniest of things: the shift of sand a few feet behind the group, the clatter of talons on an escarpment above---or below; a wilding chase miles below ground, where the Killer takes its time in killing its victim.And the darkest terror of all: don't these things need new flesh, new blood, to breed?I'm not saying you should avoid "The Descent". Not at all: in time, it might be one of my 'regrets'; those films I loathed at first, perhaps out of mood, and then came to relish (like I did, originally, with Marshall's "Dog Soldiers").But perhaps not: there is something missing here, some jubiliant, nasty, wicked horror frisson that I just didn't feel, that made "The Descent" more of a chore and far less than a pleasure.But view it another way and it does get interesting: what if Sarah suspected Juno of stealing her man from her, and made up her mind to seek revenge in those dark, unguessable depths.Now *that* would be a Descent---oh yes, indeed.JSG