AKIRAAAAA!
Volume 2 of my Netflix reviews is the scariest one yet - The Descent. Another of the new breed of horror movies, The Descent focuses on a trip that a bunch of girls make into the caves of North Carolina and the lovable sub-humans that they befriend while in said caverns. Well, not "befriend," but "are eaten by."
The movie opens to three friends white water rafting in an eight-man raft. Immediately I was terrified. "That is not safe," I said aloud. Luckily, the friends made it through the opening credits alive and I was relieved. What turned out not to be safe was the drive home, because the heroine's husband and daughter are killed in yet another tragic car accident that involves copper piping through the windshield.
After a lame nightmare/waking in the hospital sequence we flash to a year later, when the three women around last year are in the Appalachians ready to do some good old spelunking to, you know, wash away the tragedy of last year's extreme adventure. I do it all the time. Like my Grandpa Morales used to say, "Nothing like spelunking to stop you from feeling funky." Or something.
OK, so once we get into this cave and start taking bets on who's going to get mauled by the moleman first it's actually pretty nerve-wracking. Neil Marshall does a great job of capturing the claustrophobic atmosphere of crawling through caves miles under ground and the paranoia involved with operating in a pitch black setting. Once the morlocks come in to play it gets pretty mediocre. Thank God that standard caverning equipment involves so many ice picks or they would have been totally fucked.
I'll give this movie 2 out of 5 stars. It worked best when the focus of the viewer's terror wasn't the carnivorous Gollums running around but instead their own fear of tight places and the dark. It started to get pretty typical and un-scary when the scary monsters were introduced. That being said, I can't wait for The Descent 2: Molemen take Manhattan.
