Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a look at Neil Marshall's follow-up to DOG SOLDIERS, another low-budget creeper called THE DESCENT. I really dig the trailer for the flick and the below review gets me amped to see the movie! I geniunely love DOG SOLDIERS and I can't wait to see where Marshall goes as a director! Here's the review!
Dear Harry,
Hello, I just got back from an advance preview screening of Neil Marshall's new horror film 'The Descent'. his last film 'Dog Soldiers' was (in my mind) a crazy great fresh kick in the teeth, but if this new film kicked anything it was my bollocks, and it kicked them so far up into my body I could do a great Brando Godfather impression.
The screening wasn't all that far in advance (the film opens wide in the UK on Friday), but it was shown at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh by the crew from the Dead By Dawn horror film festival. The film was apparently meant to be shown in the festival back in April but Marshall didn't have it ready by then so he only showed a trailer. The director of the festival introduced the film telling us Marshall couldn't make the screening as he was knocking back warm beers down south in London. Oh well...
'The Descent' is a caving film, with 6 women going underground. One of them lost her husband and daughter a year earlier, as witnessed by two of the others (and us - ouch). This trip is a chance for our heroine to show strength and solidarity. We are introduced to the other women, including two sisters, and a lovely Irish girl with a penchant for extreme sports (who takes the piss out of caving a fair bit until things turn bad).
After a leisurely introduction to the caves our ladies get stuck, with no option but to continue into the darkness. I was lucky enough to know bugger-all about the film going into it, so I was right alongside the cavers, venturing into the unknown, and all the better for it. Fairly soon the film introduces the 'crawlers' (well they're never named, but credited as crawlers in the credits). We don't see too much of them straight away. This is A Good Thing, not because of cheap creature design, but Less Is More as we all know.
I don't want to spoil the film's plot from now on. This is the premise, and the film is a tightly paced horror film that relies on its great action sequences and tense set-ups. We're not watching an epic film here, though the first glimpse of a crawler is surprisingly like our first glimpse of Gollum in Peter Jackson's epic.
'The Descent' managed to keep me feeling physically tense for pretty much most of its running time, something I haven't felt since watching Blair Witch for the first time and being totally suckered into the hype (well I was younger then). There's plenty (and I do mean PLENTY) of BANG! horror jump-scares, but even though you can see a lot of them coming from a mile away, every single one worked a treat on me! I love getting into a horror film and letting yourself get scared, and I was able to do so very easily in this film.
But it's not all jump-scares. There are so many tense build-ups in the film, and not all of them lead to a jump-scare. Marshall clearly knows his shit with horror films, and has great fun teasing the audience. There's a fantastic little sequence where we see a narrow pathway that does a u-turn on itself. We only see one side of the path at a time. The two sisters are creeping along, the older one moving first. The camera follows her to peek around the corner to check the coast is clear, then back as she tells her sister that it is. Then still in the same shot we follow the younger sister round the corner as she moves onward, then back again to the older sister as she prepares to follow, and finally round again as she joins her younger sister. Each time the camera moves along the black face of rock between the two areas I was covering my face in my hands, totally convinced that This would be the next big jump-scare, only to be denied by Marshall, and then made even more tense as I awaited the next possible reveal. So much fun!
There are simply loads of moments like this, where the camera moves slowly but surely around a dark cave, and you just KNOW that something is lurking in the black, ready to scare the crap out of you. One of the women has a video camera, with a handy night-vision function. This comes in very useful for some not-very-original but very-well-executed "what's over there in the dark?" shots.
Another aspect of the film that I loved was how harsh it is. I think every great horror film should have at least one truly harsh moment; one that is just so unfair on the character onscreen (and thereby the audience). We get our first one when the crawlers make their first attack, and one of the girls (Juno) is getting severely amped up and just a little bit psycho. She made at least half the audience tonight cry out at the unfairness of it all! Later our heroine (the widow Sarah) gets properly stuck into a fight with a crawler or two in a big pool of bloody water. This fight sequence is just f***ing great, and it looks absolutely beautiful. Again, nothing startlingly original about characters fighting each other covered in blood, but the deep red of the gore captured onscreen just highlights the gritty harshness of the fight sequence.
Oh yes, the blood. 'The Descent' has some top quality gore and blood. Sean Pertwee's struggle with a little pooch in 'Dog Soldiers' should prepare you for what's to come in this flick. There's nothing too showy about it; no geysers of blood spraying everyone in sight for example; but what you see is violent, red, messy and perfectly suited to the tone of the film. One of the girls' breaks a leg, which pleasingly turned half the audience's faces away.
SPOILER IN THIS PARAGRAPH (well a small one)
You may notice that I've only named one of the women so far. Well the individual characters are not the film's strongpoint. There are 6 women who go down into the caves, and two of them I could care less for. There's Sarah, our heroine the widow, her mate Beth from home (a thankless role, but gets the audience's sympathy for being so nice), Juno who seems to have a lot to prove (and was having an affiar with Sarah's husband - ooh, juicy!), the Irish girl whose name I've already forgotten, but she's a fun character with quite a few jokes in her, and the two sisters, who I suspect were there as Trek-style Red Sweaters. The main 4 are competent in their roles, but it's really Sarah and Juno who stand out.
SPOILER OVER
I don't want to tell too much, but it's ok to let you know that Sarah does go f***ing mental. She transforms into a f***ing terminator, kicking serious f***ing ass and thoroughly justifying the amount of swearing in this paragraph. A lot of movies have the lead "go terminator" without rhyme nor reason, but Sarah's progression is believable and fits the film perfectly.
Neil Marshall has crafted an extremely solid horror film in 'The Descent'. It doesn't feature anything particularly original, but it's not a rip-off or anything. It feels very tight, very well made by a bunch of people who clearly know horror. They give you just the right amount of moments to breath and let out a little wry laugh, before coaxing you back into an uncomfortably tense sequence. Speaking of which, this film has the best shot claustrophobia sequence I've ever seen on film, as one of the women gets stuck crawling through a tight tunnel early on in the film. Very uncomfortable to watch.
The showing was apparently supposed to be held in a room with a larger screen, but something broke down, and rather than show it on a large screen in mono, they showed it to us on a smaller screen with full surround sound, and I am very thankful for that! The sound design in this film deserves a special mention, for capturing the tension. Nothing is rammed down your throat, but I was constantly feeling uneasy at the sounds coming from all around, especially when the crawlers make their distinctive noises. Again, nothing too wowing, but noticably of a high quality, and always put to good use. I liked the score too, with its steadily building crescendos, getting increasingly atonal, messed up and freaky.
Ah, I nearly forgot. The crawlers. Well, this wasn't a big budget film, but the crawlers are just cool creatures. They obviously had a lot of thought put into them, and as such they make sense in the setting of the film. They don't have a stand-out feature that screams cool (like the reapers' maws in Blade II for example), but they're creepy enough to help make the action and tension sequences more effective. They did however remind me alot of another recent British horror film Creep (which I saw last night - meh).
I really liked this film (as if you couldn't tell). It's a refreshingly harsh film that pulls no punches, and gives an audience who knows their horror plenty to enjoy. Thanks to the Filmhouse and Dead By Dawn for showing it to us early!
Thanks Harry, I really do reccommend this film to you! It's satisfying to know there are people like Neil Marshall out there who get horror and can put out refreshingly well made films that reconfirm your belief in the genre, especially when Resident Evil 3, Scary Movie 4, and whatever bollocksed-up American remakes of generic Asian horror films featuring ghosts of little girls with long black hair are on the horizon. Also nice to know it's all British (cast, crew, locations and money), when not much gets the chance to get made here.
If you use this, call me Rick James. It really is my name.
