Anybody else seen The Descent?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

I figured I'd go see it after it pulled 80-90% on the Tomatometer. How often do horror movies do that?

Well, I ended up liking it. It was a good couple of hours spent. That struck me as strange because by my usual opinion of horror movies this one should have been a stinker.

The movie's about a group of women spelunkers who wander into an unexplored region of an appalachian cave and wind up finding some monsters. It sounds pretty cliche, doesn't it?

It's been drawing a lot of comparisons with the movie Alien. And not just because there are slimy creatures chasing women around dark, clastrophobic tunnels. There's even a conflict between the protagonist and another spelunker that's totally unnecessary and tacked on. Sigourney Weaver and Ian Holm did it much better. It also brings to mind The Blair Witch Project and The Goonies, but hey.

Oh, and the acting- terrible. I think we found the other four former cast members of the Fox Force Five pilot. One particularly bad actress feels the need to strike melodramatic poses as she gives her one liners. And, naturally, the only performance/character that's halfway interesting ends up monster fodder.

As for scares, they're mostly Jack-in-the-Box type scares. You know the type- everybody knows there's a monster in the closet, Janey Sexpot opens the closet, the monster jumps out of the closet, everybody flinches, and that's supposed to substitute for a good scare.

And the ending, it's a real WTF moment. Apparently there's a real ending that was released with the UK version. Apparently they thought Americans were too dumb to appreciate a real ending so they just chopped off the last thirty seconds or so. I blame Bush.

So why did I like this movie? Good question. The plot's cliche, it's derivative, the acting is horrible, it's replete with cheap Jack-in-the-Box scares, and the ending isn't any good.

Well, the plot's cliche but it's still a good story. I recalled an early Lovecraft story called "The Beast in the Cave" and if this movie had been based on that story, it would have been the best and arguably most accurate Lovecraft movie made.

Yeah, the acting's bad, but it's also irrelevant. The characters in this movie aren't the spelunkers but the cave and the mosters. Both of which are well done.

And the scares are cheap, but they also work. The suspense is long drawn out, the monsters don't appear until late in the movie. They do a real good job of giving it a claustrophobic feeling, with the spelunkers spending a lot of time crawling through narrow tunnels, and seeing odd shadows and rock formations that play tricks on the mind. Some of the audience members I saw the movie with were unaware that it was a monster movie at all and they were in for a hell of a surprise. The cheap scares are also mixed in with some pretty good original scares as well, it really works.

The ending doesn't work, but it doesn't have to. It's like the ending of the roller coaster when you're pulling back up to the platform, the ride's already over and everybody knows it.

So I'll give this one three and a half stars, that may be a bit generous.

Oh, and this isn't drawing huge crowds, but I'd wait another week or two to let the crowds thin out even more. I saw this with a reasonably crowded audience, and the large volume of screaming, jumping, freaking out, and fleeing the theater in fright (by grown adults) was a little distracting.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

1. Ah, how I long for the summer horror flops of days past...

The Two-Headed Man
Night of the Lepus
The Prophecy

~sigh~