Movie Maven

The Descent
Starring: Shauna McDonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid
Written and Directed by: Neil Marshall
Official Website

I expected stupid, drunken, and mostly likely, half-naked teenagers.

This would be the likely cast of a bloody horror film about cave creatures. Stupid, drunken, half-naked teenagers venture into dangerous cave for a stupid, drunken, half-naked good time and are promptly ripped apart by Bat Boy from the Weekly World News. This is how most would have written it. So I went to The Descent after a colleague told me it "had a few good jumps," hoping to be scared, but not expecting to be surprised.

Turns out I was both.

Because the characters in Descent are not stupid, drunken teenagers. They instead are a bunch of British women- amateur spelunkers, friends and comrades. They gather in the woods of Appalachians to bond and help one of the group through her grief over the deaths of her husband and young daughter the year before. A surprising amount of the film is taken up with character development, and all of the women become more and more nuanced and complex- a rare thing in a genre that normally reverts all of its characters to "types."

But it's when they get lost that their real characters begin to show themselves. Some of them become heroes and Ripley-like superwomen. Some of them become cowards or reckless. And when the fearsome Bat Boys make their appearance (I'm sorry, but that's just what they look like) then you really see who they are as people.

It's a gruesome movie, but the repetitive attack scenes often make the movie lose its edge and originality (yes, spewing gore, yeah, he's eating her stomach, oh look, there's another throat being ripped out, blah blah blah.) And while the Bat Boys are terrifying as they unexpectedly pounce on the women, there's only so many times you can use that move as a scare tactic before it simply becomes cliched.

There is a pretty bad-ass scene involving a pool filled with blood though.

In the end, it is just another horror flick, but it's worth a viewing simply for the fact that it used living, breathing characters with a story. It wasn't just about blood and guts, it was also about the complexities of humanity. A little bit. Mostly blood and guts, though. Let's not get carried away.