The Descent (2005)

[Flack]

This post contains major spoilers.

You ever have one of those days, maybe a road trip or a vacation, where nothing went right?

In The Descent, six spelunking women head out on an adventure to explore a system of caves located in North Carolina. The girls are all expert climbers, and have done their homework prior to entering the cave. They've brought all the equipment necessary to get them into and out of the cave, made sure that the cave has three exits in case anything goes wrong, and even brought a map of the cave in case they get lost.

But when it rains, it pours. A cave in blocks the path the original entrance to the cave, and in the following scene another girl admits that they've actually entered an unmapped, unexplored cave (she was hoping they would name it after them). The group finds themselves stuck underground with no known exit, a finite amount of light, and no extended source of food or water. This day couldn't get any worse!

(Ten minutes later, a series of mole-like humanoid creatures arrive intent on eating the girls' faces.)

It's been a long time since I sat through a movie as tense as The Descent, a film that is constantly tightening the screws of tension. While I'm not particularly claustrophobic, I think almost anyone would squirm if they were crawling through a crevice barely large enough to fit through when the sound of rocks breaking surrounded them. Everything in the movie is a ticking clock -- lights, food, water, air, and ultimately, the relationships. No one has a cell phone, no one is sure which passage leads to the surface, and every time the group stops to gather their wits, "crawlers" arrive to attack. At first it's one, then it's more than one, and before long it's a lot more than one. Imagine if in Jaws the protagonists were scuba divers running out of air and trapped under ice.

Final spoiler warning.

Sarah, the film's main protagonist, suffers more tragedies than the rest of the group. In the beginning of the film, her husband and daughter are killed in a head on collision, and her best friend, Juno, abandons her. Inside the cave, Sarah learns that Juno had an affair with Sarah's husband, which weighs into her decision to abandon Juno and let the crawlers feast upon her face. At the end of the film, Sarah finds the exit and makes her escape as the sole survivor of the group.

That is, if you watched the American version. In the UK release, which is roughly a minute longer, Sarah's escape turns out to be a hallucination. After a quick jump scare, the film cuts back to Sarah in the cave, about to meet the latest wave of crawlers. Survivor count, zero.

Sometimes, the sharks win.

[pinback]

Hey, I actually saw and loved this one. And yes, the UK version is vastly superior just because of that one minor change at the end. It's like Blade Runner theatrical vs. director's cut. No happy ending for you.

I give The Descent four stars, and in my opinion one of the best horror movies ever made. (*)



(*) Almost all horror movies are terrible, so the bar here is lower than virtually every other genre, but still.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I also remember seeing this in a theater! I think I did not appreciate how great it was the first time. I dunno, I kept expecting a wave of psycho killing zombie monsters to really be obvious about how they were going to destroy everything. I was not ready for the TENSION.

A few years ago I remember Pinback saying how great the first Alien movie was. I had seen it once as a teenager. It was fine, I thought. But I watched it again as an adult and it, of course, is amazing and I try to watch it every year.

I gotta go find me a copy of The Descent and get this back into the rotation.

I would also like to add that I tried to download "Saw 3D" aka "Saw: The Final Chapter" and .... I can't think of another movie that is so obviously mis-directed. I gotta find out what is going on. The first trap in Saw 3D is in broad daylight and shot on camera that I think are worse than what I have now. This did not warrant its own thread, so here we go.

[AArdvark]

It's nice to hear about a movie where the protagonist doesn't win at the end. You wouldn't want all movies to end like that but enough to keep a grasp on reality

[Jizaboz]

That’s one reason of many why House of 1000 Corpses is one of my favorite horror movies.

The Descent definitely freaked me out with all of the claustrophobia caving going on. Most of us probably had at least some interest in caving due to playing games like Adventure and Zork. But man, those scenes of them just sliding head first into narrow holes to find alternative routes terrified me much more than anything that happened after the cave dwellers were introduced.

[Flack]

Fun trivia fact: the "cave" in The Descent doesn't really exist. Every single interior cave scene was shot on a soundstage, and the "entrance" to the cave was CGI. Apparently a few times in the movie you can see rocks bend or give way as people lean on/against them. Could have fooled me.

I thought it was pretty good. I didn't know it was a UK film going in but having watched so many of these things I figured it out pretty quickly. A US director would have gone to great lengths to individualize all six girls, both by giving each one a deep backstory and physically differentiating them by ethnicity, accents, hair color, and outfits. Probably would have had some twins in there.