Merrick here...

Hey folks...

The lovely Selena took a break from battling plague-ravaged madmen to send in a write-up of this weekend's screening of THE DESCENT, which took place in the bowels a cave roughly 90 miles outside of Austin.

I can't believe they actually showed this film in a cave. Better hope that some future Guillermo del Toro movie doesn't continue his sewer motif, 'cause god knows where they'll screen that...

Here's Selna...

Hey guys, Selena here dropping in to tell you about Saturday’s Rolling Roadshow/Fantastic Fest event for the film “The Descent”.

Though you all should be familiar with the Alamo Draft House’s Rolling Roadshow events by now, in case you have been living in a cave deep underground for you entire life here is the idea: The Rolling Roadshow is comprised of film screenings in places that are significant to the film itself, or as NetFlix.com puts it “Famous movies in famous places”. An example of one such screening would be showing Jaws where it was filmed at the beach in Martha’s Vineyard, MA, which will be happening on August 5th.

For this particular event, the film “The Descent,” which takes place in a cave and has been tagged as a horror thriller comparable to “Alien” (something I will get back to in a few minutes), was being screened inside of the Longhorn Caverns which are located outside of Austin, TX.

When I fist read about this event over two months ago I was giddy with excitement. Who wouldn’t want to experience a super scary movie in the actual environment that that movie takes place?

Unfortunately for the genre of horror however, this is harder said than done as one would be hard pressed to book an actual haunted house for a screening of “The Amityville Horror” or a space station for a screening of “Event Horizon”. For this reason or maybe just because the Alamo Draft House really knows how to screen a movie, this particular event was sure to be a hit.

Upon Arriving at the Longhorn Caverns a solid six minutes before our own descent into the caverns was supposed to begin, I was immediately lost in the excitement of the moment. As I stood in line in front of the ominous mouth of the cave.

I was in moviegoer heaven as I watched people shoving cans of Lonestar beer into their backpacks before donning bright yellow hard hats complete with lights and the film’s title logo.

After the obligatory warning about wandering away from the group while walking to the “room” where we would be watching the film, delivered not without a note of irony by a Longhorn Caverns employee, we began our journey into the cave.

After walking through several smaller caverns, some with ceilings so low that even I had to duck, I found myself faced with what looked like hundreds of hard core, hard hat wearing moviemongers, all reclining in lawn chairs and crowded together in a very large cavern. People had climbed the rocks surrounding the floor of the room and were settled in perches that reached almost all the way up to the ceiling. We grabbed a spot in back and set up camp, making sure to stick close together in case we got scared.

It was at this point that I realized that despite all of the fun that I was having, I was a little nervous about seeing this movie. As a huge fan of violence, gore, and existential situations, I look forward to this type of movie so fervently that often I am disappointed when the films don’t match my ideal mental construct of what I think they should be. Be this as it may, I had the highest of hopes for “The Descent” and little did I know that I would not be let down, not in the least.

“The Descent” is appealing and can be enjoyed from several different perspectives. First, It engages a relatively novel setting for a widely released horror-type movie, that of a realistic uncharted cave system. The small spaces and lack of light natural to the setting lend a genuine and believable air of Closter phobic intensity that normally a filmmaker would work hard to achieve artificially. In addition to this, the film spends just enough time introducing the cast of five women, letting the audience briefly experience one character’s tragic fate in a car accident. This serves as a focal point for the group bonding of the five women and eliminates the need to introduce an extended background to each character in order to get the audience to care about what happens to them.

Next, the situation of a caving expedition gone horribly awry was enough to sell me on the film and I was definitely uneasy about the idea of introducing a troglodyte type monster almost half way through it. This was because I was afraid that it would take attention away from the simple voyeuristic thrill of watching people in a desperate situation and in so doing chance the meaning of the film. Also, I thought that they looked stupid in the previews. I soon realized however, that the introduction of monsters ostensibly forces a moment of genre definition and intriguingly, “The Descent” does not easily fit into a ready-made genre mold.

The realistic and uninhibited displays of gore brought on by the ways that the women are disfigured by events that transpire after they realize that they are lost are horrific enough to render the film even grosser than Eli Roth’s “Hostel”. However, “The Descent” is not just another gory movie in the tradition of films like “Final Destination” and “The Saw”. Nor is it a “monster movie” as a comparison to the “Alien” franchise might imply.

Rather, I believe that it fits best in the realm of genre revisionism. By this I mean that it is not a traditional horror movie. It borrows traits from both “gore” type movies and “monster” type movies without binding itself to the conventions of either. The troglodyte creatures were introduced midway through the film because they are not the focus of the film as they would have been in a more traditional “horror” type movie. Instead, they were a venue used to advance the protagonist’s second and more significant “descent,” that of a total reversion to animalistic survival mode. Though this might deter some hard core horror fans from seeing the film, rest assured that “The Descent” leaves nothing to be desired from either genre.

The cave monsters, or troglodytes, or whatever you want to call them could almost be seen as a throwback to the old school monster in the sense that they are clearly just guys in costumes. Their movement is what really brought them to life and made then creepy to me. They could almost have been players in the Cirque De Sole from hell in the sense that their fluid and extremely fast lizard-like scampering was realistic, jarring, and genuinely scary.

Watching them fight to the death in desperately fast paced hand-to-hand combat-like battles with the five women was truly awesome and inspired more than one eruption of applause from the audience. In addition to this, the fact that they are blind, using sonar-like clicking noises to hunt prey, allows for the women to hide in plain sight and makes for several very intense scenes. If none of this convinces you that the monsters are actually pretty cool, then simply consider that fact that they are often inclined to very sloppily eat their prey alive, and trust me the film leaves nothing to the imagination.

In an effort not to spoil any major plot points, I’ll end my review by saying that this movie gets an A+ for being really gory, pretty damn scary, and very well developed. If you get a chance to watch it in a cave go for it, otherwise I’m sure a movie theatre will do.

Thanks for reading!

Selena

Thanks for the write-up, Selena!

THE DESCENT...uhhhh...spelunks (?) into U.S. theaters August 4.