Review of Descent (2005) by Emmanuel T — 08 Aug 2012

The Descent is about a woman who goes on a short vacation with her family, and her friends when suddenly she loses both her husband and her daughter to a fatal accident. One year later she goes on a hiking trip with her friends, in a cave. But when they suddenly become trapped inside the cave, without any directions. They must band together to survive, despite their lack of supply. But that's not all they need to worry about, actually the cave is filled with strange blood sucking creatures. Uh-Oh!

The entire film manages to hold tension, suspense, scares, and shock. It holds all these categories from the beginning, and to the unsuspecting ending. It does take a while to finally see the blood thirsty creatures though, in fact half of the movie is just about being stuck in a cave. But still, it delivers every substance of horror throughout the movie. Even when the woman are just stuck in the cave. Just imagine...you enter a cave, you start to explore it, then suddenly you realize that you do not know the way out, and then your flashlights/flamers/and every source of light starts to go dead. Caves are pitch black and if you don't know what you're doing, then you can easily die of the following:

Drowning.

Hypothermia.

Exhaustion.

Fall while climbing.

Falling rocks.

Becoming strangled, due to rope failure while climbing.

And much, much more!

Pretty intense huh? And on top of all those things, the hikers suddenly encounter brutally behaved creatures who will stop at nothing but to rip them apart. Literally! Another thing about this movie is that the entire cast is female (not counting the woman's husband at the near starting of the film.) These girls fit into their characters bit, by bit and the results are powerful. Most horror films nowadays just love to splatter out the whole film with buckets, and buckets of blood (at least the R rated ones do.) But this film manages to balance its gore at a clever pace. I mean, yes this film does contain some very gory scenes that may upset some audiences. But when it does, it does it at the right time. It does this so that we can have a story. A story to remember. It will scare its audiences away from caves, like Jaws did for sharks. But if you are only interested in seeing this movie for the evil creatures, then you'll have to wait halfway to get to them. Overall, this is a perfect film to fall into the horror genre.