Get Down
Told you I'd be back. Lucky you.
And I return bearing good news. It's been a long, hard struggle, but now our days of worry are finally over. I know, you thought you'd never be scared again. You thought Scream had sounded the death knoll. You thought Scary Movie had fitted the noose. And when they remade Psycho, you knew that nothing was sacred anymore, and horror really was dead.
And then came a nasty little low-budget knockoff of Se7en called Saw, and you got a little hope. You'd almost forgotten what you'd been missing, until you saw what it had. Crappy writing? Check. Atrocious acting? Check. Cary Elwes' maniac laughter as he hacks off his own leg? Hold. The. Phone.
Sure, there was Cabin Fever a couple of years before, but that was a fluke, right? Except then Eli Roth came back last year with Hostel, hot on the heels of a sequel to Saw, and a remake of The Hills Have Eyes that somehow was even more hideous (in a good way) that the first one.
And now, after a drawn out decade of post-modern, self-conscious, tongue-in-cheek, teeny-bopper horror crap, I think I can safely say it: the bad old days are back, kids. And I couldn't be more pleased.
A moment of confession: I haven't yet seen Cabin Fever, Hostel, Saw II, or The Hills Have Eyes. But believe me, they're in the Queue now. And what makes me gush over a handful of flicks I haven't seen yet? The bad boy they've all been leading up to: The Descent.
Oh. My. God. I've been waiting for this one for years.
The first thing you see as the movie opens is three women in a raft on a river. For anyone steeped in '70s slasher flicks, this is a big ol' flag. And if that weren't enough, right after the credits come up, we get a shot of two women in a car tooling along a lonely mountain highway in...the Appalachians.
Oh yeah. This isn't going to end well.
One of these gals is Sarah (Shauna MacDonald), who's a year away from a horrible car accident that killed her kid and I think maybe her husband. She's one of a clutch of Scottish thrill-seeking chicks who go white-water rafting and spelunking, and are led by American bitch-jock-queen Juno (Natalie Mendoza). Juno's invited everyone out to seriously rural Virginia for a little therapeutic cave-diving and female bonding. On the way to the cave, Juno, the mischevous little scamp, "forgets" the guide book and takes the girls out to an undiscovered--and hence less touristy--cave system. 'Cause, as she puts it, it ain't no fun without a little risk.
And that's about all the introductions you're gonna get. Seriously. Everyone else is cannon fodder. I'm not even sure how many people were in the group to start with. It wasn't until a couple of people had died already that I decided I ought to start learning everyone's name. Lessee, there's Sarah's friend Beth (Alex Ried), Juno's reckless "protege" Holly (Nora-Jane Noone), and a couple other girls (Saskia Mulder and MyAnna Buring) whose relationship is, to put it lightly, unclear (Really. One review I read identified them as Swedish half-sisters, and another said they were mother and daughter. I thought they were a lesbian couple. Go fig.).
Director Neil Marshall (who did 2002's Dog Soldiers, which is also pretty amazing and which I also haven't seen) ratchets up the tension as soon as everyone gets underground, lighting them in emergency flare red or Glo-Stick green, and piping them through birth-canal-sized tubes of rock. By the time one of these tubes collapses, trapping them two uncharted miles underground, my claustrophobia buttons had been mashed a few times, and I could feel my pulse through my thumb. And then Holly falls down a hole and breaks her leg, complete with splintered bone sticking out and all, and I'm writhing sympathetically in my seat. Damn, but I do miss that feeling.
Then come the cave-dwelling cannibals. Hot damn.
And that's pretty much it, plot-wise. The rest of the flick is a relentless trip to hell. But not an unstylish one. One of the best images is of the traumatized Sarah, newly risen out of a pool in the cannibals' feeding room, soaked in blood and offal, her climbing axe covered in cannibal brain-matter, and looking like both Sigourney Weaver in Alien and Sissy Spacek in Carrie. It is truly an awesome sight.
That's no accident, either. Marshall knows what he's doing, or at least what he wants to be doing. He liberally sprinkles The Descent with quotes from Nosferatu, Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Day of the Dead, and any number of '70s slasher horror flicks. They're effectively used, too, not just clever film-geek wanking. This guy is definitely down with the old-school gore flick.
The movie's best quality, though, and what sets it apart from the post-Scream crap of the late '90s, is it's dedication to scaring you. From the get-go, this movie is fucking grim. Even the slumber party banter of the women before they descend is shot through with the occasional jab, and anything that may have been funny in those scenes is quickly forgotten once things get rolling. After that, I think there is exactly one joke in the rest of the movie. Beth tells it to Sarah to keep her from freaking out when she gets stuck in a narrow passageway, and the tension in her voice renders it incoherent. Down here in the caves, there's no room for funny.
One thing the Great Joe Bob always did at the end of his reviews was run through a few vital stats for the flick. I'm now going to totally rip him off. Bear with me now, this is my first time.
Eight bodies. No breasts. Neck eating. Intestine eating. Copper pipe to the face. Rock fu. Flare fu. Climbing axe fu. Blood spray. Protruding bone. Evisceration. Gratuitous violence. Gratuitous girl power. Gratuitous rotting elk. "One bat. Two bats. Fifty bats. Ha ha ha..." Flicker Award Nomination to Natalie Mendoza for killing anything that gets in her way, or at least leaving it to be eaten by bat-people. Flicker Award Nomination to Shauna MacDonald for braining it with a rock rather then leaving it to be eaten by bat-people. Joe Bob Briggs Memorial Award Nomination to Neil Marshall for doin' it the drive-in way. Four stars. Uncle Ovid says check it out.
(Apologies to Joe Bob)
And I return bearing good news. It's been a long, hard struggle, but now our days of worry are finally over. I know, you thought you'd never be scared again. You thought Scream had sounded the death knoll. You thought Scary Movie had fitted the noose. And when they remade Psycho, you knew that nothing was sacred anymore, and horror really was dead.
And then came a nasty little low-budget knockoff of Se7en called Saw, and you got a little hope. You'd almost forgotten what you'd been missing, until you saw what it had. Crappy writing? Check. Atrocious acting? Check. Cary Elwes' maniac laughter as he hacks off his own leg? Hold. The. Phone.
Sure, there was Cabin Fever a couple of years before, but that was a fluke, right? Except then Eli Roth came back last year with Hostel, hot on the heels of a sequel to Saw, and a remake of The Hills Have Eyes that somehow was even more hideous (in a good way) that the first one.
And now, after a drawn out decade of post-modern, self-conscious, tongue-in-cheek, teeny-bopper horror crap, I think I can safely say it: the bad old days are back, kids. And I couldn't be more pleased.
A moment of confession: I haven't yet seen Cabin Fever, Hostel, Saw II, or The Hills Have Eyes. But believe me, they're in the Queue now. And what makes me gush over a handful of flicks I haven't seen yet? The bad boy they've all been leading up to: The Descent.
Oh. My. God. I've been waiting for this one for years.
The first thing you see as the movie opens is three women in a raft on a river. For anyone steeped in '70s slasher flicks, this is a big ol' flag. And if that weren't enough, right after the credits come up, we get a shot of two women in a car tooling along a lonely mountain highway in...the Appalachians.
Oh yeah. This isn't going to end well.
One of these gals is Sarah (Shauna MacDonald), who's a year away from a horrible car accident that killed her kid and I think maybe her husband. She's one of a clutch of Scottish thrill-seeking chicks who go white-water rafting and spelunking, and are led by American bitch-jock-queen Juno (Natalie Mendoza). Juno's invited everyone out to seriously rural Virginia for a little therapeutic cave-diving and female bonding. On the way to the cave, Juno, the mischevous little scamp, "forgets" the guide book and takes the girls out to an undiscovered--and hence less touristy--cave system. 'Cause, as she puts it, it ain't no fun without a little risk.
And that's about all the introductions you're gonna get. Seriously. Everyone else is cannon fodder. I'm not even sure how many people were in the group to start with. It wasn't until a couple of people had died already that I decided I ought to start learning everyone's name. Lessee, there's Sarah's friend Beth (Alex Ried), Juno's reckless "protege" Holly (Nora-Jane Noone), and a couple other girls (Saskia Mulder and MyAnna Buring) whose relationship is, to put it lightly, unclear (Really. One review I read identified them as Swedish half-sisters, and another said they were mother and daughter. I thought they were a lesbian couple. Go fig.).
Director Neil Marshall (who did 2002's Dog Soldiers, which is also pretty amazing and which I also haven't seen) ratchets up the tension as soon as everyone gets underground, lighting them in emergency flare red or Glo-Stick green, and piping them through birth-canal-sized tubes of rock. By the time one of these tubes collapses, trapping them two uncharted miles underground, my claustrophobia buttons had been mashed a few times, and I could feel my pulse through my thumb. And then Holly falls down a hole and breaks her leg, complete with splintered bone sticking out and all, and I'm writhing sympathetically in my seat. Damn, but I do miss that feeling.
Then come the cave-dwelling cannibals. Hot damn.
And that's pretty much it, plot-wise. The rest of the flick is a relentless trip to hell. But not an unstylish one. One of the best images is of the traumatized Sarah, newly risen out of a pool in the cannibals' feeding room, soaked in blood and offal, her climbing axe covered in cannibal brain-matter, and looking like both Sigourney Weaver in Alien and Sissy Spacek in Carrie. It is truly an awesome sight.
That's no accident, either. Marshall knows what he's doing, or at least what he wants to be doing. He liberally sprinkles The Descent with quotes from Nosferatu, Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Day of the Dead, and any number of '70s slasher horror flicks. They're effectively used, too, not just clever film-geek wanking. This guy is definitely down with the old-school gore flick.
The movie's best quality, though, and what sets it apart from the post-Scream crap of the late '90s, is it's dedication to scaring you. From the get-go, this movie is fucking grim. Even the slumber party banter of the women before they descend is shot through with the occasional jab, and anything that may have been funny in those scenes is quickly forgotten once things get rolling. After that, I think there is exactly one joke in the rest of the movie. Beth tells it to Sarah to keep her from freaking out when she gets stuck in a narrow passageway, and the tension in her voice renders it incoherent. Down here in the caves, there's no room for funny.
One thing the Great Joe Bob always did at the end of his reviews was run through a few vital stats for the flick. I'm now going to totally rip him off. Bear with me now, this is my first time.
Eight bodies. No breasts. Neck eating. Intestine eating. Copper pipe to the face. Rock fu. Flare fu. Climbing axe fu. Blood spray. Protruding bone. Evisceration. Gratuitous violence. Gratuitous girl power. Gratuitous rotting elk. "One bat. Two bats. Fifty bats. Ha ha ha..." Flicker Award Nomination to Natalie Mendoza for killing anything that gets in her way, or at least leaving it to be eaten by bat-people. Flicker Award Nomination to Shauna MacDonald for braining it with a rock rather then leaving it to be eaten by bat-people. Joe Bob Briggs Memorial Award Nomination to Neil Marshall for doin' it the drive-in way. Four stars. Uncle Ovid says check it out.
(Apologies to Joe Bob)
posted by Uncle Ovid at 3:15 PM
1 Comments:
I like horror, and this movie creeped me out so bad I couldn't finish it...(just after they started to get whittled down by the underground baddies). Very, very claustrophobic....
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