What a disappointment! With all the good reviews I was really looking forward to this one – it’s rare to see a horror movie get such good press. But man, what a letdown. It wasn’t offensively bad or moronic in the way that so many horror movies are, but it simply wasn’t scary (how many times can you get scared of something jumping out of the dark?), and I just didn’t care all that much about the characters. Plus there were a couple plot puzzlers –
Juno clearly killed her friend (Beth?) on accident; why would a dying Beth tell Sara that Juno had murdered her, not to trust Juno, to find her own way out of the cave, etc.? Even if Beth believed all that, Sara should have had her doubts – what possible motivation could Juno have had to kill Beth, when they’re all busy fighting for their lives in the cave? It just didn’t make sense. This subplot added nothing to the movie.
On the whole a major disappointment. *1/2 out of ****
First, I saw the trailer. I thought, “Hey, great. Someone’s made a movie about wet underwear models in a cave.” Looked like a pretty trashy movie to me.
Then, I saw Rotten Tomatoes. Ninety-flipping-percent? Are you serious? Okay, so maybe it’ll be good.
Now this thread. Good or bad, people? Everyone agree!
Currently 82% (74% for cream of the crop). Still very good percentages.
I’m prepared to be proven wrong. I like good horror movies, and I usually trust movie critics, but this one just didn’t do it for me (the guy on rogerebert.com is comparing this to “Jaws,” “Alien,” and “Deliverance”?? saying it quotes “The Third Man,” “Vertigo” and “Apocalypse Now”??). It’s a bad sign that I spent a good part of the movie when I was supposed to be scared trying to pinpoint where all the various British accents were from.
Wow, I totally disagree with Rodgers01. I absolutely loved it. I consider myself a pretty serious horror fan, and I consider The Descent to indeed be one of the best horror movies in years. Why? Well, for one thing there are no stupid Abercrombie and Fitch models running around half naked and having romantic subplots in an effort to get the WB crowd in to see the movie. For another, it really conveys to me the tension and isolation and disorientation and claustrophobia and vertigo that the characters were experiencing; the monsters were horrific but they weren’t the only source of fear for the characters. In contrast to Rodgers01, I actually cared when something bad happened to any of the characters; compare that to the characters in, say, Wolf Creek, where there is a long buildup apparently in an attempt to make people relate to the characters and yet I didn’t care about any of them.
As for your question about the plot point:
Beth tells Sarah that Juno “did this to me, she left me here like this.” Sarah is in fact doubtful and probably thinks that Beth is delusional from loss of blood or something, but then Beth gives Sarah the necklace that she pulled off of Juno, the one that says “Love every day” or something like that; it’s the same phrase that Sarah said was something that her husband always used to say. This reveals the affair to Sarah and makes her believe that Juno in fact did betray Beth as well. On top of all of that, Sarah is slowly going mad; the medication she takes early on (before they go into the cave) is most likely an antispychotic, I think. She keeps hearing her daughter laughing in the cave, which is clearly a delusion and by the time that Sarah catches up to Juno she is so traumatized and near-psychotic that she seems almost animalistic, she is acting almost on pure emotion at that point.
Not great. Not *Lady in the Water * horrible, but definitely not great. Regardless, I liked it, and would recommend it to other horror movie buffs.
Unfortunately, the US version has a different ending than the UK version, which now makes it possible for there to be a sequel (which is apparently in the works). Having seen both versions, I have to say that the UK ending (available on YouTube for you motivated Dopers) is better - it at least answers the question of what happens to Sarah.
But come on - a sequel? I guess Lion’s Gate fell victim to the terminal case of sequelitis that every other studio seems to have. I really don’t see an opportunity for plot expansion for this movie. It’s better left as a one-off.
I also loved it, I thought it was tense and scary. I really liked the use of light - you’d expect underground movies to be dimly lit, but they got really creative with light sources which made the movie surprisingly colorful.
I thought it was super tense BEFORE the cave dwellers started attacking! Just being in the cave, with no food, knowing the lights were going to go out, no sure way out - tense!
ending spoiler
[spoiler]I definitely liked the original European ending much better, you can find it on You Tube. In the Euro ending, after Sarah sees ghost Juno in the truck, she wakes up back in the cave (the big escape was all a dream). She sees her daughter and her daughter’s birthday cake. The camera pulls back and the light from the candles on the cake become her torch, you can hear the cave dwellers all around her.
That gets me thinking - if the escape is the dream, at what point does the “escape dream” begin? Before she and Juno go all rambette on the cavies (that’s about as likely as her finding a hole to crawl out and running right to her truck)? Or maybe, the cavies are all part of the dream and she killed her friends?[/spoiler]
I saw the UK version several months ago. The ending is slightly different, as described in spoiler boxes above, and there’s a bit more gore. I liked it a lot, and thought it was scary as hell even before it turned into a monster movie. In fact, it didn’t need the monsters at all. I do wish they hadn’t even hinted at that plot twist in the trailers, but I guess it’s the kind of thing that puts butts in seats.
For the US, the movie ends with Sarah fleeing the cave in the truck, stopping by the side of the road and puking. She turns and a bloody version of Juno is sitting by her. Her eyes open wide in terror…fade to black. I much prefer the Euro ending which continues with Sarah opening her eyes again in the cave, seeing her daughter and the birthday cake. The birthday cake becomes the torch, you can hear crawlers all around and you figure Sarah isn’t going to make it. The US version has a lot of interpretation - is it a dream? is she haunted by Juno? etc etc
I just watched the UK version, and I thought it was completely retarded. Despite being in English, I couldn’t understand a word the characters were saying, thanks to the accent. I didn’t think it was scary at all, as the whole thing was predictable, everything except for [spoiler]the girls betraying each other (and there wasn’t even enough uniqueness added to each character to be able to tell them apart, especially in the darkness).
What was the whole deal with the girl and the birthday cake? Ok, her daughter’s dead, and she’s being delusional, but so what?
I kept waiting for the flashlights to die, especially with all the foreshadowing, but even that didn’t happen. I think if the girls actually were in complete darkness, giving Gollum the upper hand, THEN there would have been some sincere horror…and it would have saved on the cost of film…[/spoiler]
Why so many people seemed to like it is completely beyond me. Worst movie I’ve seen this year, by far!
Saw it… the UK version. Wow I was totally underwhelmed. The only part that gave me the creeps was
when one of them was caught in the small opening which was actually quite claustrophobic and scary
While I prefered the original ending to the one I understand the US release has opted for (Why by the way?!?! It is only a few minutes more and makes more sense) I didn’t reallty enjoy it at all. I saw it all before (Alien)
The second half was a let down. You could actually count to four each time before the “springloaded cat” scare (No there wasn’t a cat…) You could see those moments from miles away.
I wasn’t into the characters and was mislead by the beginning
it would have been better that she had died in the accident and this trip into hell would have been a literal one, or at least into purgatory. Teh scene of the lights going out as she ran down the hallway seemed to portend to a more supernatural flavour. The Little girl really had nothing to do with the entire plot. Perhaps instead they should have shown the husband seeing as his indescression lead to the pointless face off in the end…
Over all I found very little to be scared about aside from the setting. the cave golems did nothing for me
Those of you who HATED The Descent…who thought it wasn’t scary at all, that you didn’t care about the characters…is there a horror movie you think is far superior to The Descent in those areas? Because as shocked as some of you are that anyone likesThe Descent, I am equally shocked that anyone who likes horror movies could hate it as much as it seems you do. Most everyone I’ve talked to, aside from this message board, at least liked if not loved it. I’m flabbergasted!
[SPOILER]I got the stuff about the affair, and maybe it just gave Sara the excuse she was looking for to kill Juno. But if she had been thinking rationally (as she at least appeared to be in that scene) she would have still realized that there would have been absolutely no motivation for Juno to have killed Beth (at least not that we’re shown in the movie), especially when they’re all busy fighting for their lives in the first place.
Sara going psychotic is something I didn’t pick up on too much (well, except to the degree that anyone who’s already manically depressed is going to go psychotic when they’re stuck in a cave with bloodthirsty killers after them…). If we’re to believe that she’s psychotic though, they didn’t really use this to great effect. I’m picturing a cross between “The Cave” and “The Shining,” with Sara stalking Juno and the others while they both independantly fought off the creatures. That might have been interesting, but we didn’t get any of that till the very last minute.[/SPOILER]
Well, I didn’t hate it, but I was extremely disappointed and bored by it. Better horror movies? Off the top of my head, “Rosemary’s Baby,” remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “Se7en,” “Halloween,” “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “The Exorcist,” “Psycho,” “28 Days Later.” Most of those are bona fide classics of the genre, so maybe it’s an unfair comparison. But even compared to lesser movies… I’m going to lose credibility for saying this, but even the recent “Poseidon Adventure” remake, while definitely having problems of its own in terms of characters, dialogue, acting, etc., was more effective than “The Descent” in terms of portraying the claustrophobia of characters stuck in a tight situation. “The Descent” had that one suspenseful scene early on when Sara got stuck in the tunnel, but after that it didn’t even really use the claustrophobia angle much at all.
Really, what made this movie stand out? (Cribbed from something I posted on IMDB):
Plot – Nothing particularly original here. In fact, we’ve had another movie within the past year that has nearly the same plot and setting (“The Cave”, of course, though I didn’t see it so I can’t guarantee). In a more general sense the whole “sympathetic characters trapped in some place with strange mutant people trying to kill them” thing has been done innumerable times.
Character Depth – About the only attempt to give any character depth was killing off Sara’s family at the beginning. A tragedy does not a character make - this is an old, old movie trick. Beyond Sara’s misfortune, what do we really know or care about these characters? Nothing. You’ve got the headstrong one, the one who flips out, the tough one, the tragic one – they’re just cliches, and it’s hard to care about a cliche.
Acting – The leads were okay, but nothing particularly memorable. Maybe it was because they just weren’t given much to work with.
Cinematography – Maybe gains some points here; a cave lends itself to interesting photography and tricks with light and darkness, and they had some fun with it, but there was nothing that really stood out.
Direction/Editing – Fair/Workmanlike. You can only pull the old “thing jumping out of the dark!” trick so often before it gets boring, and this movie crossed that line.
Overall this movie reminded me of that old line about it being both original and good – the original parts weren’t good, and the good parts weren’t original. Alright, I’ll stop talking about it now…
Huh. Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree then. Although I would agree that the movies you listed were superior to The Descent, (with the possible exception of 28 Days Later). I’d put The Silence of the Lambs up there, too.
Yeah, different strokes and all that. Most people seemed to like it, so c’est la vie. Oh, I did like the original ending more than the American one. I’m not even sure why they changed it; “The Blair Witch Project” had a bleak ending, and that didn’t hurt its box office success any.
This is the second movie that I thought would be based on this book (the first being The Cave). Granted, the book isn’t a literary feat, but it is high concept compared to these movies. I think it would make a better movie, but it would probably have an excessive run time.
Most of the list I have has already been used. I may add a few Romero Zombie flicks and Alien have better characters which you can feel for when things go bad.
I didn’t feel anything for these characters.
I’ve seen many a film where people are being chased in small unfamilar areas by monsters/boogeymen so there wasn’t anything new there for me. I already mentioned the “Springloaded cat” trick this film plays too many times. Horror isn’t just something popping out unexpectedly (Except here they telegraphed each and every scare so it’s not even unexpected) it is a feeling of dread and well fear. The only scene that did that didn’t involve the boogums.
It was when she was trapped.
The Last confrontation before the film began its endings… well, it was over the top and made no sense to me. In fact it made the main character lose a few points in my book. It like every other sudden scare seems to come out of nowhere. No build up in resentment, no real hint of teh possibility of that type of violence just two scenes and boom.
Like Blair Witch I see this as being hot for a while but when the initial hype wears off I figure most people won’t revisit it.
I get what you’re saying about the “springloaded cat” (SC) trick; I too dislike overuse of that one. To me that method specifically means that there is a buildup of tension and then BOO but it’s NOT really the monster. Some movies go WAY overboard on that, like the recent remake of The Omen (speaking of which, I would hope that if any of you saw The Omen you would consider that to be the worst movie of the year so far, people!) but I’m beginning to think that there are only so many ways to get a “scared” reaction from audiences anymore. It seems like anytime an element of a horror movie is well-received it gets done to death quickly (creepy black-haired little girls, anyone?). I haven’t TRULY been scared by anything in a horror movie in a long time, anyway…the closest thing is maybe a chill that I felt near the end of The Ring when the boy says, “Why did you do that? You weren’t supposed to help her…!”
Anyway, in some movies the overuse of the SC trick not only seems lazy but nonsensical; however I felt like this might be a logical setting, as the limited lighting would make sudden revelations more likely. I didn’t feel that they were particularly overused; yes, we had the hallucination of the rod through Sarah’s head in her nightmare, the bats, and Juno’s ghost in another of Sarah’s hallucinations, but other than that I didn’t feel that they were of the SC variety; in fact the first two times we see a Crawler (once in silhouette and then when Sarah shines a light on the one feeding they AREN’T startle-scares accompanied by quick loud blasts of music or whatever…they are more lingering shots in fact.
Anyway, yeah. I’m not going to go too much more into defending it; I liked it, I know some people don’t, and somehow the world will go on.
