Day Four: "The Descent" (2005)
The Descent is an incredibly atmospheric British film.
A year after Sarah's husband and daughter died in a horrific car accident, she meets back up with her extreme sports loving friends. They decide to go caving in the tourist-y Boreham Caverns as a way to get Sarah back into life. However, reckless (and badass) Juno decides to take them to an undiscovered cave system instead. After a cave collapse, the women have to find their way back to the surface. If the crawlers don't get them first.
I really love this film.
It's really creepy and atmospheric. The monsters don't show up until almost 45 minutes in, but to be honest, the film is incredibly creepy even before that. In fact (as scary as they are), the crawlers are almost superfluous. It's a tight, scary film before they even show up.
I love the characterizations. Each woman is a distinct character and nobody feels like a stereotype that's around just to pad the body count. Each one of them makes a mistake that leads the group into deeper trouble, but they're all believable mistakes, even Beth's. She just witnessed Juno murder a crawler with an ice axe, but she still walked up to her silently. However, this makes sense because she's obviously in shock. And nobody really holds the idiot ball. (Other than Holly, but that's only because she's an adrenaline junkie. She's quite smart in other ways.)
I especially love that you alternatively hate and love Juno. Yes, she got them into this situation in the first place. Yes, she leaves SPOILER to die. Yes, she puts herself and others into unnecessary danger in order to satisfy her ego. But she's still badass and she legitimately cares about Holly.
And then there's the alternate character interpretation. The theory that Sarah is hallucinating all of this and killing her friends off one by one actually makes sense. And it's an idea I like. Without this theory, the crawlers just seem superfluous. I mean, yes, they're scary and it's nice to have an antagonist. But they're almost too much. HOWEVER, if Sarah is imagining them so she doesn't have to deal with the realization she's murdering her friends, well that makes much more sense. And there are a lot of Sarah/crawler parallels in this movie.
The one thing that kept throwing me off is that most of the film takes place in North Carolina but was filmed in the U.K. So as someone who knows the mountains of North Carolina, I could tell that the area in the film was wrong. And that the highways were wrong. And the license plates on the trucks. (Which got a close-up so you really think they could've got that one right.) Also, we don't have moose down here. It's too warm in the summer, even in the mountains. They'd boil. So when the group comes across the mutilated moose, I was mostly thinking, "Why does everybody want North Carolina to have moose? We have other big animals!" (I'm looking at you, Cabin Fever 2.)
However, it was really, really enjoyable and I really do love this movie.
Link to masterlist.
A year after Sarah's husband and daughter died in a horrific car accident, she meets back up with her extreme sports loving friends. They decide to go caving in the tourist-y Boreham Caverns as a way to get Sarah back into life. However, reckless (and badass) Juno decides to take them to an undiscovered cave system instead. After a cave collapse, the women have to find their way back to the surface. If the crawlers don't get them first.
I really love this film.
It's really creepy and atmospheric. The monsters don't show up until almost 45 minutes in, but to be honest, the film is incredibly creepy even before that. In fact (as scary as they are), the crawlers are almost superfluous. It's a tight, scary film before they even show up.
I love the characterizations. Each woman is a distinct character and nobody feels like a stereotype that's around just to pad the body count. Each one of them makes a mistake that leads the group into deeper trouble, but they're all believable mistakes, even Beth's. She just witnessed Juno murder a crawler with an ice axe, but she still walked up to her silently. However, this makes sense because she's obviously in shock. And nobody really holds the idiot ball. (Other than Holly, but that's only because she's an adrenaline junkie. She's quite smart in other ways.)
I especially love that you alternatively hate and love Juno. Yes, she got them into this situation in the first place. Yes, she leaves SPOILER to die. Yes, she puts herself and others into unnecessary danger in order to satisfy her ego. But she's still badass and she legitimately cares about Holly.
And then there's the alternate character interpretation. The theory that Sarah is hallucinating all of this and killing her friends off one by one actually makes sense. And it's an idea I like. Without this theory, the crawlers just seem superfluous. I mean, yes, they're scary and it's nice to have an antagonist. But they're almost too much. HOWEVER, if Sarah is imagining them so she doesn't have to deal with the realization she's murdering her friends, well that makes much more sense. And there are a lot of Sarah/crawler parallels in this movie.
The one thing that kept throwing me off is that most of the film takes place in North Carolina but was filmed in the U.K. So as someone who knows the mountains of North Carolina, I could tell that the area in the film was wrong. And that the highways were wrong. And the license plates on the trucks. (Which got a close-up so you really think they could've got that one right.) Also, we don't have moose down here. It's too warm in the summer, even in the mountains. They'd boil. So when the group comes across the mutilated moose, I was mostly thinking, "Why does everybody want North Carolina to have moose? We have other big animals!" (I'm looking at you, Cabin Fever 2.)
However, it was really, really enjoyable and I really do love this movie.
Link to masterlist.