Horror Movie or Chick Flick?
All-Female Cast Slows Descent

When six women find themselves trapped in a cave, it sounds like the start of an interesting story. One might expect a story about female solidarity, survival skills, and testing the limits of endurance. But director Neil Marshall turns it into a horror film that is a test of patience. The Descent takes forever to begin and the one-dimensional characters offer nothing but confusion.

The Descent
Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) from The Descent. Photo credit: Alex Bailey. (Lionsgate, 2006)
Directed by: Neil Marshall
Written by: Neil Marshall
Starring: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid,
Saskia Mulder, MyAnna Buring, and Nora-Jane Noone

Rated R (for strong violence/gore and language)
Running time: 99 min.

FilmGuru's Rating : 2 out of 10.

The Descent is a story of six women. There's Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), the star of the show; Juno (Natalie Mendoza), the tough one and Sarah's best friend; Beth (Alex Reid), Sarah's other friend; Rebecca (Saskia Mulder), the expert climber; Sam (MyAnna Buring), Rebecca's little sister; and Holly (Nora-Jane Noone), the wild one. Don't try to tell them apart. It doesn't matter.

These women meet each year to test their endurance in a physical challenge. When the film begins, they are finishing a white water rafting trip. Soon after, Sarah loses her family in a car accident.

A year passes, and the team meets in the Appalachian mountains for a spelunking expedition. Of course, things go wrong.

The film drags for the first hour as the women explore the cave, coming into conflict with nature and their own tempers. When a crawlspace collapses, they discover they are in trouble. Juno, the organizer of this trip, has not brought a map because they are not where they were supposed to be. She has purposely led them to an unexplored cave in an effort to heighten the thrill.

As the women wind their way through tight crawlspaces and climb over deep gorges, the darkness of the film is alleviated (barely) by the lights from their headlamps and the occasional lit flare. The result is a murky film that begs for better cinematography.

Following a full hour of personal challenges and dangers, the team finally runs into the expected "horror" twist. In the depths of the caves, they are attacked by creatures that resemble starving, albino humans. (Think Gollum, from The Lord of the Rings.) The monsters move by crawling on the floors, walls, and ceilings of the cave and apparently use sonar to see by emitting a screech like a bat. The film, which was starting to resemble a bad Discovery Channel special on spelunking, finally turns into a horror movie. Unfortunately, the turn is too little, too late. By the time the "crawlers" show up, the story has become terminally dull.

The buddy system, which has been ignored for much of the movie, completely breaks down. The rest of the story falls into a mess of random encounters between the women and the Gollum-monsters. Instead of coming together to face the new threat, the women scatter and must decide between trying to escape or finding their lost friends.

As each woman fights for survival, she is also fighting for her sanity. While Sarah seems the most fragile because of her recent loss, she is the strongest for having already faced her worst fears. Talking about subtext to this film, however, may be giving it too much credit.

As if the cave isn't a spooky enough place to set a horror film, Sarah eventually finds herself trapped in the belly of the beast, so to speak. The lair of the crawlers is littered with bones and half-eaten carcasses. Sarah also dips into gooey lake of blood as she fights off a crawler. A lake of blood? Really? It's this kind of cheap horror stunt that makes The Descent laughable.

The idea of an all-female cast horror movie is interesting. Certainly if you're making Sorority House Massacre it's a necessity. With The Descent, however, one must ask why. Is the director trying to say something about female empowerment? Is the cave a symbol of female oppression? The answer, however, is that Marshall envisioned this as a sister film to his werewolf film, Dog Soldiers, a story of six men.

The six female characters offer nothing special. The lack of characterization early in the story comes back to haunt it when the action begins. All the faces blur into one. In the dark and semi-dark, only Sarah stands out as an individual. The others become "Victim #1," "Victim #2," etc. In the end, the large ensemble cast offers nothing but a higher body count.