The Descent Falls Limp
Three women have just gone through a traumatic loss, especially Sarah (MacDonald) whose husband, and daughter died in an horrendousÃ?¯Ã?¿Ã?½car crash. ThereÃ?¯Ã?¿Ã?½was a question whether or not Juno (Mendoza) is in love and has been having an affair with Sarah’s husband.Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½Sarah begins to seeÃ?¯Ã?¿Ã?½hallucinations on acount of the accident. She seesÃ?¯Ã?¿Ã?½the creepy image of herÃ?¯Ã?¿Ã?½late daughter holding her own birthday cake, and we begin to suspect that she may beÃ?¯Ã?¿Ã?½”descending into madness”.
Time passes and Juno decides to get all of her friends together for one big journey into the unknown. They spend a night getting to know each other and making friends. Much to everyone else’s surprise, Juno leads the group into a cave that’s supposedly never been discovered before. It’s first passage offers mysteries and fairy tale beauty. Then Juno takes the group ofÃ?¯Ã?¿Ã?½ladies even further down the hole.
Deep in the claustrophobic tunnels of this cave, Sarah continues to see visions of her daughter which can be somewhat shocking at times. She almost gets crushed under falling rock. She may be going mad with fear. The ladies struggle to crawl across canyons black in the bottom, presumably 2 miles deep. The wildest of the group, Holly (Nora-Jane Noone) breaks her leg in a spine-tingling creepfest of gore. Then The Descent begins its own descent.�¯�¿�½
As scary as those bat-men in the darkness can be at times, they seem contrived and almost humorous in their creation. ‘Maybe they’ve evolved to live perfecly in their environment,’ Juno queried. Such a line is directly out of an old X-Files episode. Only in that old Fox TV show, it actually sounded smart, but in The Descent such a line sounds corny.Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½
Sarah and the few remaining girls try to fight off these human/bat mutations. One by one, the girls get picked off. At times, it’s hard not to recall all the similar storylines to allÃ?¯Ã?¿Ã?½other monster-horror films before it; aÃ?¯Ã?¿Ã?½girl goes off on her own and gets either slashed or eaten. Then when Juno and Sarah have finally made a descent into madness, they’re like a pair of super-heroines, killing these beasts of the abyss left and right, and not getting a scratch on them.Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½
Sarah finds out that Juno had betrayed her trust and the trust of her best friend in the world, Beth (Alex Reid). She cripples her and rushes to get out of the cave by herself. She reaches her Bronco II parked on the side of a dirt road, and we’re subjected to one last shocker for an ending.
The Descent isn’t horrible. It isn’t too scary either. The movie, directed by Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers) is missing the right tones to get the heart racing, put you on the edge of your seat, and make you ready for the scares. He just seems to throw in a nasty tale of survival from a race of ugly creatures in the bottom of a black cave. It does deliver one or two freaky moments. Then it goes limp again.
If you want an adventurous film filled with thrills and chills, The Descent is for you. If you want a scary movie that could give you nightmares, rent Saw 1 and 2 at your local video store.
