Blog From The Bench

I am dead convinced that people have forgotten how to make horror films. Oh sure, they can occasionally come up with halfway decent ideas for said efforts – documentary filmmakers get lost in the woods, groups of teens stumble upon a household of murderous cannibals – but for the most part, there are very few examples of flawless execution. As a matter of fact, there are even fewer examples of outright competency. More times than not, these lackluster efforts come from the homemade movie front – and with good reason. After all, you can't expect individuals with limited budgets and resources to deliver on their usually overextended concepts. But the mainstream monster movie shouldn't suffer from such sloppiness. With adequate funds and the best movie magicians in the business behind them, a commercial horror director should deliver a quasi-quality product almost every time. Sadly, cult fave Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers) doesn't even begin to prevail with his almost unanimously praised follow-up The Descent. For my money, it's one of the most overrated and poorly realized spook shows in a very long time.

Now, I have certain theories about successful onscreen terror, ideas I've accumulated over my four decades of film fandom. They are by no means universal, so feel free to scoff at will. To me, you must have a plausible premise, or characters that compel you (or, in a perfect cinematic world, a combination of both) in order to get "hooked" by a horror film. Many of the genre's most memorable efforts – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist, Psycho, Halloween – have narrative foundations that you can easily identify with, while delivering people one can sympathize with and root for. Hostel has both of these elements, while the recent revamp of The Hills Have Eyes had more plot potential than personalities. Still, it delivered the shivers a heck of a lot better than this spastic spot of spelunking. The notion of going down into a claustrophobic, unexplored cave system is just not something I could see myself doing. It's the same level of implausibility that occurs when, in a completely clichéd and stupid manner, a character foolishly returns to the scene of a previously known danger. Sadly, this also happens The Descent. Characters who clearly understand the peril around them walk blindly (metaphorically, not literally) into harm's hackneyed way – over and over again.

Not that we care very much about our vixens as victims here. Marshall tends to paint his personal portraits in the broadest, most basic human colors possible. Our lead Sarah, a fragile casualty of a pre-credits car crash, is supposedly suffering from some post-mortem depression. She lost her family in the wreck, and she pops pills to ease her (one assumes) suffering. Still, none of this is ever explained. The friendships appear random and concocted for convenience sake, our uber-egoed villain, the needs a less obvious moniker Juno is all self-righteous rigidity. The rest of the cast comes across as players in a group therapy theater company, with every standard stereotype present from the implied lesbian to the conspiratorial best friend. And then there are the monsters – or the "supposed monsters", if we are to believe some Internet conjecture. Chalk white, blind as their cave cousin bats, and seemingly living on a steady diet of human and/or animal torsos, these wall-walking SOB's aren't so much scary as a narrative contrivance. After all, with dread comes a need to source out the scares. But as symbols of fear, they're really unnecessary. Marshall could have easily made a movie where the feeling of being trapped in a cave leads a group of six high strung women to turn on each other with frightening fatal results. Instead, he borrowed a few beasties from the Italian style of splatter and turned on the creature features.

While much of my reaction to the movie can be pegged on my growing cynicism to the overall cinematic experience, and the dearth of inventive fright flicks in general, I still respond when the situation calls for it. I find Open Water endless fascinating, not so much terrifying as psychologically uncomfortable. The same goes for the updated Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a movie that managed to be both gruesome and gratifying without relying on freak show effects. Even something like Saw II delivers more soul stinging chills than ten minutes of this X-gamer goofiness. But perhaps the most disturbing element of The Descent, at least for me, is how seemingly out of step I am in the critical community. Being the odd man out doesn't really bother me that much. But when I read other reviewers who point to the films "startling originality" and "inventive thrills" I begin to question my own convictions. What did they see that I didn't, and more importantly, WHY didn't I see it? Is the entire Descent experience generational, losing older fans of more well-managed macabre while feeding directly into the slam bang universe of a demographic raised on the '80s VHS idea of fear. Will this film follow the trajectory of another initial "classic", the now more or less forgotten Blair Witch Project? Does this mean that The Descent will have about a decade of viability before becoming rote? Who knows? Interestingly enough however, contemplating such questions ends up being far more engaging than any single sequence in this otherwise subpar scare film.

5 out of 10

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