Directed by Neil Marshall, 2005. Review originally written 11-07-05

What a freaking headache.

I’m not the worldest biggest fan of Dog Soldiers, I think it is a decent enough flick, but I thought buzz was very solid about The Descent…

Maybe it was, the movie is a piece though. From the get go it is very trying. The characters were resoundingly uninteresting and wooden, not to mention unrealistic. I’ve met a good deal of women in my short life span, dare I even say a good deal of very attractive women, but not a single one that is not only very attractive, but a mountain climbing, white water craving, spelunker. Seriously, Neil Marshall, cast some people who at least fit the bill. This is in no way a dig at women by saying they typically don’t seek the extreme ’sports’ or me saying that one who does has to be ugly. If you’re going to have a movie that abandons realism in regards to the plot, you either need to have painfully real characters are monumentally absurd ones.

But not only are the characters wildly unrelateable, they’re barely given any development and introduction. Once people start dying, save for the two or three who did get something that resembled an introduction, you can barely tell who is actually dying - they’re all the same.

I’m no geologist, but I do know that there are still an unknown amount of caves to be discovered. But why in hell would some random chic, who of course has zero backstory, have knowledge of a cave that no one else has ever explored? That just doesn’t make any fucking sense.

The camera work was only half inspired and often times just annoying. Not to mention the score that just stabs sharply at the brain. Bah!

The only, only, place this film exceeds is with the creatures. They’re crafted and introduced with a skill and understanding of how to do so that isn’t evident in any other aspect of the film. They look great and move fantastically. But that is about as far as they go and as far as the movie goes.

I have to go take some Tylenol.