The Descent
A bunch of morons go spelunking (Spoilers)

The Descent, a well renowned, critically acclaimed British horror flick from the director of Dog Soldiers, had somehow passed me by over the years. With Google Play offering me only 99p to rent it for 48 hours, I thought I’d give it a go.
From IMDB: A woman goes on vacation with her friends after her husband and daughter encounter a tragic accident. One year later she goes hiking with her friends and they get trapped in the cave. With a lack of supply, they struggle to survive and they meet strange blood thirsty creatures.
I thought the opening was very interesting. It set up the extreme sports loving Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) and her friends, Juno (Natalie Mendoza) and Beth (Alex Reid) as we seen them white river rafting. Sarah’s other half and her daughter were at the bottom waiting for them and even in this short scene it was insinuated that there was something between her husband and Juno. On the way home, Sarah was distracting her husband whilst he was driving leading to a fatal car crash resulting in the deaths of both her husband and her daughter.

The film cuts to a year later and the three friends gather together with three others to go spelunking and for some reason we’re supposed to feel sorry for Sarah. She may have lost a husband and a daughter but for me we didn’t get to know any of them because their appearance in the film was only fleeting. This is a method a lot of film scripts adopt. I call it forced empathy and characterisation because we’re meant to feel sorry for the main character right from the opening scene. But we don’t know the main character yet, it’s too early, for all I know she might be a bit of a nob and it turns out, Sarah, is a bit of a nob and a grumpy nob at that. But she was in good company as the whole group of six come across as a bunch of morons. The night before the expedition they all get drunk and bond but I always felt they were always on the verge of having an argument to the point where they didn’t come across as close friends.
From that moment on I felt the film would fall in to an easy, generic trap and that was a story based on stupid decisions rather than clever, well written plot points, and the fact that Juno decided not to take the guide book confirmed my suspicions. Running blind into dark caves, jumping down holes on their own are just two examples of this and you realise you’re just watching a bunch of morons going cave diving using luck and fortune as a guide than actual knowledge and wits. It’s difficult to feel sorry for any of them as they bungle their way through the cave system. The only real positive about the first half of the film was the direction. Neil Marshall managed to capture the claustrophobia of spelunking, crawling through slight gaps, the darkness the closeness of the cave walls.

Around the half way mark the creatures turn up and the film takes a decidedly steep, upward turn. Suddenly, the stakes are raised, the level of threat reaches new heights and there are some excellent ideas within the first five minutes of them turning up. The introduction of the night vision camera always gives good value to ghost and monster flicks and the film is at its strongest when all you can see are caves washed with shades of green. Even though the six main characters are all bozos, the peril they suddenly find themselves in makes you feel something for them which made me wonder whether all of the first forty-five minutes was completely necessary. Personally, I would’ve liked to have seen more creatures and the girls using their wits to outsmart their adversaries rather than indulge in a couple of fist fights.

After a while the film settles into a sequence of set pieces, the fight in the pool of blood, the crawler creeping over two of the girls, the unrequired and poorly set up tension between Juno and Beth, the latter leading to a cheesy moment between Sarah and Beth as Beth explains her predicament all the while a hole in her throat is pumping out blood. There’s nothing like a disastrous spelunking adventure to settle your differences. One of the aspects I learned from film school was to always think about how a film looks. The moments when Sarah looks a bad ass, covered in blood, swathed in crimson light certainly plays into this, as well as Juno kicking crawling butt, coming off as a take on Rambo. Visually, it all worked but I wish there was a little more story thrown in.
On the whole, a strong second half made up for a lacklustre first half and the film is definitely worth a watch if you’re short of something to do and have 99p in your Google account. It has some great moments, some good scares and claustrophobic feel, it’s just a shame the characters were idiots and the story could have done with a little more substance.


For some reason I thought I had already seen this Hammer Horror classic and maybe I had when I was younger but I could not recall the opening scenes suggesting I had not. I recognised imagery from the film thanks to trailers, clips and segments in Iron Maiden videos; perhaps this was the cause of my mistake. My expectations were high when hitting play as some, especially in the British Horror Group I am a member of, herald it as peak Hammer with the great Christopher Lee often siting The Devil Rides Out as his favourite Hammer film. It had a lot to live up to, however, invariably such films fail to deliver due to unmeetable expectations, but Christopher Lee, Devil worship, Charles Gray, directed by the great Terence Fisher…what could go wrong?
First of all, it was lovely to see Christopher Lee starring as the protagonist, not the action type, that was the job of Leon Greene, but as the wise council and voice of reason, no wonder it was Lee’s favourite Hammer film, he got the chance to play a good guy for once.
The film doesn’t hang about, as soon as Leone Green lands his plane and is met by Christopher Lee. He asks about someone called Simon and within a few lines of dialogue we’re at Simon’s new house because they’re worried about him and hadn’t seen him for at least three months. My first thought was he’d met a girl or taken a new job but it turns out he’s having a dinner party and hob nobbing with a group of new friends from an astronomical society. Of course, Christopher Lee suspects they’re all devil worshippers ready to sacrifice chickens. For me, it was a stretch for him to conclude this within the first nine minutes of the film and I wish more time was given for his suspicions to embed. A general decline in Simon’s behaviour perhaps or more clues gathered to Simon’s new ‘hobby’, it all happened a little too quickly, especially as Simon’s behaviour is quite pleasant and not sinister at all. Simon’s bought a new house, I’ve not seen him in three months that means he’s dealing in black magic. Simon insists Greene and Lee leave (this would make more than thirteen at the party and thus unable to perform the ritual) but Lee punches Simon’s lights out instead before kidnapping him and slugging the butler at the same time, it was all a little clunky for me.







