Darren Goes Spelunking With Some Girlies! Like, for real?

(In a perfect world, this movie would have an all-male crew. Something about men going into holes you're not supposed to go into, the tight pants, the constant holding onto large hard objects, the asses constantly being in someone else's face......but wait a second. That wouldn't work!)

The DESCENT - 9/10

Obviously, I'm partial to the genre and no real amount of convincing will get some of you to see this classic in the making. BUT! I'll give it my best shot.

This is the best film of the year so far for me, and an easy contender for end of the year top 5.

The Descent is from director Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers, which I'll be checking out this weekend) and tells the tale of six women who go on a cave diving expedition in the Appalachians. As you may know, shit goes down and they end up stuck inside the cave with what appear to be trippy, Gollum-esque monsters. You may have ignored a similar movie called The Cave for appropriate reasons. Dom't make that mistake here. The first 45ish minutes are build up and most non-genuine fans of the genre will hate this and declare it boring or slow. It's actually well-paced with an excellent, foreboding aura of dread. One of the girls, Sarah, survived a tramatic experience the year before in which there was more going on than she realized, and all that tension comes striking back once the rocks collapse and the gals are trapped deep down inside the cave system. Yes, the best monsters in horror movies are actually metaphors. The characters clashing with each other and ultimately the evolved bat people of (let's go with) West Virginia - hey, no crazy rednecks for once! - do a number on each of the girls leading to what ulimately becomes a horror morality play. (!!!!)

So now you know a bit of what the film's about, here's why it is so great: Marshall's expert direction for starters. He has several films in development including a zombie film. He's the real deal. I even squirmed in my seat long before the monsters reared their heads; the claustrophia runs rampant. Wait till Sarah gets stuck in the tunnel part and you'll see what I mean. The attacks scenes are incredibly well shot and edited. You know those fast paced, whiz-bang Michael Bay action sequences where you can't tell what the fuck is going on because of the frenetic editing? You get some, but you can follow them! Miraculous! Since it is underground and dark, Marshall finds clever ways of making the monsters even more terrifying. The first sight of one is truly eerie, and when the gals use the light from flares or a home video camera, it really gets under your skin. The scares here are actually geunine. Me - the most nonvocal person during a movie - had to practically bite my lip from yelping at the screen in horror. There's some dazzlers of effective jump sequences - none of which are people appearing from behind someone at random and then the soundtrack booms for no other reason than to keep the audience awake or erase their ADD for a moment! Nope, it's all real scares. It's not the goriest film by far, but it will satisfy the gorehounds easily and put an "ewww!" and an "ick!" in the mind of the more conservative horror fan. The 6 women are all perfectly played. There's not a lot of character development and we get enough of the characters to get just who they are. In other words, we actually care about them. And when it comes to fighting back at the caveman-bat-people-WV-underground-hillbillies, they are well built women, so we buy it. And much like Emily Blunt, Natalie Mendoza deserves to have a very long career. I think this might be my favorite performance by a leading actress so far this year. There are several references to other films such as Carrie, The Shining and Apocalypse Now, but none of these are too cheeky. The one I'm most intrigued by though is how the film is similar to Picnic at Hanging Rock. In the same vein that Peter Weir uses a rock formation and disappearance as a sympbol of woman's sexual maturity, Marshall finds ways to make the caverns and monsters mean lingering, never acknowledged suspicions and resentments of our very own friends.

It's a shame Lions Gate - the studio that used marketing to turn crappy low budget horror Saw movies into blockbusters and get a Best Picture Oscar for Crash which had the least amount of precursor wins of any Best Picture winner in Oscar history - couldn't make this take off more. It'll finish it's theatrical run with $25m, far more than the film cost to make but still chump change compared to most successes.

Nevertheless

10 Best Horror-ish Movies of the Aughts (so far)

(I'm not saying these are the scariest of the decade...)

1. The Descent
2. The Others
3. Joyride
4. 28 Days Later
5. May
6. George Romero's Land of the Dead
7. Jeepers Creepers
8. Slither
9. Shaun of the Dead
10. Ginger Snaps