Neil Marshall is the shizzle. He’s already proven himself with Dog Soldiers – the ONLY good werewolf movie from start to finish – demonstrating how low budget is no impediment to fun, fast and vicious action movies. With The Descent he has crafted a much simpler, more focussed film that further suggests he’s quite easily TNBT, if only distributors would release films on time.
Sick of waiting, I eventually gave in and purchased the DVD from the UK, and I’m glad I did. The Descent kicks arse. It’s significantly flashier than its predecessor (no crappy ‘it’s a full moon’ lighting cheats here), and the camera is wielded smoothly and confidently, but the rawness is still there. Marshall wields suspense and release expertly – we know something’s gonna happen… but we’re still shocked when it does.
The main portion of The Descent features an entirely female cast, which is much stranger than it sounds, especially for the genre. Sure, females have been the heroes in horror films since the days of Halloween or Alien, but they’ve usually shared the duties with the men, or merely been added to provide variety in a male-dominated film. Here we have six women in a cave – and of course something deadly and malicious. The setting is, of course, perfect for such a film, and one scene in particular was perfectly claustrophobic, reminding me of when I first read the caving chapters in Thor Heyerdahl’s ‘Aku Aku’.
For all my jumping up and down with glee, The Descent isn’t perfect however. The script isn’t as strong as Dog Soldiers, which had apparently been honed over almost a decade as they struggled to get the film made. There are a couple of lines that are a little clichéd, which is disappointing. The other major flaw was that I didn’t actually get to know all six of the women. I could relate to the main three, but the others were a bit of a mystery. I only recognised them as ‘those two brunettes’ and ‘the other blonde’. Their characters weren’t fleshed out at all in comparison to more significant performers.
At first I was a little underwhelmed, but soon warmed to the narrower focus of The Descent. This film is a much more mature effort from Marshall, which relies on subtlety, allusion and narrative depth in a way that his first film never did.