The Descent
August 6, 2006
Rated: R Runtime: 99 min Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
The Descent earns it’s bread and butter by scaring you, and it has several tricks up it’s sleeves to get the job done. Afraid of the dark? Check. Don’t like tight spaces? Check. Monsters? Check. And it’s real (GOTCHA!) ace is the “jump out and scare you” moment, it has plenty of these.
We start off with a group of women doing a bit of whitewater rafting, and we’re not talking simple stuff here, I wouldn’t put my ass down that river. They get through it just fine and we learn that not only do they like some good adventure, they’re darn good at it. Things don’t go that well once they leave the river though, you get your first (GOTCHA!) though it’s kinda mild and we setup the emotional stuff for later in the movie. Gotta have that motivation for later you know, this is a group of women after all…
A year goes by and the ladies get together for the yearly adventure. This time they are doing a little spelunking / caving in the Eastern U.S. of A. After a couple of uncomfortable emotional scenes (women, remember?) at the cabin it’s off to the hole in the ground. Again, my ass wouldn’t be jumping into this hole… these are some tough chicks. Apparently a little too tough as the leader of the group decides that she doesn’t need to take the guide book since she’s “never been lost a day in her life”. They are so screwed.
As expected something goes wrong and they find creatures living in the caves that have a taste for meat, and they aren’t particular if it’s still breathing or not. Oh yeah, eaten alive? Check.
This movie is done exceptionally well. It’s tough to shoot a scene that gives the audience a sense of claustrophobia but director Neil Marshall pulls it off perfectly. He also had a knack for those (GOTCHA!) scenes, I stopped counting when it passed ten of them, but I’m guess it there were around 13 or so good ones in the movie. That’s a huge number and some of the later ones will still make you flinch even though by that point you’re very much on the lookout for them.
The amount of blood and gore is also quite impressive, and it’s good old-fashioned effects work and not the pansy-ass CGI that we’ve gotten used to these days. The only thing missing is a few nude scenes. You’d think with a movie all about adventurous women that at some point one of them would have at least gotten topless.
If you want to have your date squeezing your arm all night then this is the movie for you. If you don’t have a date, go anyway and just have fun watching the rest of the audience flinch every few minutes.
Popularity: 12% [?]
Seen it? How many stars do you give it?
(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
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