Going Down

The Descent finally made its way into US theaters this weekend, long after it played pretty much everywhere else abroad. This horror film was generating quite the buzz from its home country (the UK), and Lions Gate was only too happy to snap it up for US release, trumpeting the film as though they'd created it themselves.

Having now seen it, I'm not sure the buzz was entirely warranted. The movie was certainly not bad, but for everything it did well, I felt it really messed something else up.

In the plus column, the structure of the story is a major throwback to really classic horror movies. Like the original Halloween, a tension gets ratcheted up slowly for a huge chunk of the movie before "stuff starts to happen." By the time the creature in the dark makes its first appearance, you're primed to jump out of your seat at the slightest sound.

The sense of claustrophobia inside the underground caves is realized tremendously well. There are many scenes where, even sitting in the theater, you feel very uncomfortable. The rock walls and passages are so oppressive at times, I think there's no force on this earth to get me to go caving, even without a freaky monster trying to eat me.

But, in the minus column... despite doing such a great job in using darkness in the first half of the film, it flops in the second half with regards to the monster. Everyone knows a film monster is scarier the less you see of it. Sadly, we see all too much of the "crawler," as it is called in the end credits. And it's not a terribly original monster either, evoking a little bit of the Flukeman from The X-Files, a little bit of "larval Dracula" from the Francis Ford Coppola film, and a little bit of Voldemort from the last Harry Potter movie. We see too much, and what we see, we've seen before.

Two of the six women that venture down into the caves carry the bulk of the story, and both of them are drawn fairly well. Sadly, the other four are virtually indistinguishable from one another. Once they're all dressed up in similar climbing gear, and lit only by flashlights, headlamps, and flares, I honestly could not tell them apart. Sure, many characters in a horror movie are only so much meat to be slaughtered anyway, but you do at least want to be able to tell who's who.

And then there was the gore. I don't really have problems with gory movies, but this one went way over the top. Again, I must mention the first half of the film, which gradually (and more or less bloodlessly) ratcheted up the tension. But in the final reels, it suddenly felt like a completely different movie had been spliced onto the reel. We had fountains of blood, geysers of blood, giant pools of blood. So much blood, it was literally funny. I almost laughed out loud at one point, it was so over the top -- and that was most definitely not the reaction the movie was trying to evoke.

Add it all up, and I think I'm going to give the film a C. That's pretty much a true average of my feelings about it, because I could see myself dissecting it into parts that would get an A and other parts that would get an F.

Oh... one final footnote. As was the case when the UK film 28 Days Later was brought over to the US a few years ago, the studio decided not to give America the original ending. The US release of The Descent has the last 60-90 seconds or so of the film chopped off. If you're at all curious what that was, it can be viewed online. (Man, what did we do before YouTube?)