Film
Horror in the Caves: The Descent
- Director
- Neil Marshall
- Certificate
- 18
- Running Time
- 100 mins
Thanks to advances in technology, the horror genre is rapidly running out of places where its victims cannot plausibly call for help. Neil Marshall has to jump through a few hoops of contrivance to get there, but after stranding half-a-dozen sexy lady adventurers underground in a claustrophobic cave system that nobody knows they’ve entered, and from which there is apparently no escape, he succeeds admirably in winding up the tension, dropping in a succession of bone-splintering shocks and jolts. Then he unleashes the Crawlers.
A year after poor, traumatised Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) lost her hubby and cute moppet in a vividly depicted car accident, her thinly-characterised extreme sports enthusiast girl pals decide to cheer her up with a caving expedition high in the Appalachian mountains. Alpha female Juno (Natalie Mendoza) is in charge. Students of the genre will quickly recognise that the function of the other four is to die horribly before the final showdown. Ignoring the usual horror film portents, they descend into the cave system and are promptly trapped by a rockfall. What’s more they’re in the wrong caves and have only a limited amount of power left in their torch batteries. Several injuries and much palm-moistening suspense later, Sarah spots what appears to be a human figure scuttling about in the distance. Trouble is, he’s more peckish than helpful.
Like Marshall’s cult werewolf flick Dog Soldiers, this is a good old-fashioned nasty horror flick, with lashings of gore, lakes of blood (literally), and the repeated satisfying crunch of bone on rock. The scuttling, screechy, ravening Crawlers are cool too, resembling a cross between Gollum and Chris Smith’s similarly subterranean Creep. Sure, the characters behave stupidly and appear curiously under-dressed for their expedition, the dialogue is Vintage Dumb (“This is not good,” someone exclaims upon stumbling into a chamber full of bones), and Juno’s dark secret is easily guessable from the outset. But Marshall really delivers where it counts, enhancing the claustrophobia and terror by lighting the entire film by torch and flare, with occasional cutaways to infra-red digital video. One sly nod to Aliens apart, there’s not a whiff of wretched sniggering student ‘post-modernism’ or in-joke smuggery either. And just when it looks as though we’re going to get a cop-out ending, the film rewinds and serves up the kick-in-the-teeth one we secretly craved.
is needed now More than ever
It’s back on screen in spooky old Redcliffe Caves as part of Bristol Film Festival‘s ever-popular Halloween week Horror in the Caves season. Go here for ticket information.
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