The Descent directed by Neil Marshall (UK, 2005)
Neil Marshall’s debut feature film – Dog Soldiers (2002) – was set in the Scottish Highlands and followed the (mis)fortunes of six trainee British soldiers battling in vain against rabid werewolves. These men ended up barracaded in a woodland cottage alongside a lone female – Megan, a zoologist. In true Night of the Living Dead style they are picked off one by one .
Perhaps conscious of the strident macho vibe of this film, Marshall’s follow up – The Descent – flips the gender to follow the (mis)fortunes of six women who are into extreme sports. The opening scene shows these lasses braving rapids in a dinghy.
The lone man in this story doesn’t last long. One could say he drew the short straw or, more accurately the long metals poles, since these are the sharp objects he is impaled upon in a freak car accident while driving his wife, Sara (Shauna Macdonald) home. The couple’s young daughter dies in the same accident. Moments before the crash, Sara says to him “You seem distant” and it transpires that this fatal distraction was all due to a clandestine fling he was having with another of the female adventurers, Juno (Natalie Mendoza).
One year on, Juno has organized a group reunion with a planned caving trip in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina (although the film was shot in Hertfordshire, England and Scotland). The claustrophobia of this ill-fated underground adventure proves the perfect setting for a horror film. When you’re down a hole the escape options are severely limited. In haunted houses there is at least the possibility of making a run for it although, as we well know, this rarely ends well.
In the first half of the film, we follow the ‘chicks with picks’ who, almost inevitably, find themselves trapped in a tunnel system without a map to guide them. Juno breaks the news to the other five that this particular cave is previously unexplored. Thanks for the warning!
Things go from bad to worse when the women realise they are not alone. The other cave-dwellers are pale-skinned creatures in human form that are billed as ‘crawlers’ on the credits. Appearance-wise they are a mix between Gollum and alien life forms. Behaviour-wise they are rabid monsters who feed on human flesh.
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