bobafred

A few years ago I read a book called The Descent. It was so good that I hoped that someday it would be made into a movie. Months passed and I stumbled onto some info that a movie called The Descent was being made and I was happy. Then I did more research and found that while the movie was called The Descent and it had a similarish story to the book, it was in fact not related and I was unhappy. Then I did more more research and found that this movie was getting some real good reviews and such in the horror world and I was happy again.

That was over a year ago. For various reasons the film was only recently released here in the states after an initial debut overseas way back in 2005. Lori and I went and saw it last night.

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The Descent (IMDb) tells the story of a group of adventurous females that get together once a year for some form of extreme sporting activity. This year they choose cave diving in the North Carolina mountains. They start off down a huge hole and then things go bad.

The filmmakers did an excellent job of portraying the ultra cramped claustrophobia of the cave system. This was accomplished by having the ladies crawl through impossibly tight passages and a very limited lighting setup. This trait alone made the movie creepy as hell. Throw in some otherworldly creature types and you’ve got the makings of a fun, bloody as hell horror movie. Yeah, there’s a fair amount of gore in this one.

While the descent is an obvious reference to the caves, there’s more to it than that. There’s a decent to a primal rage and a lust for survival at all costs that comes across very clearly. These bitches are fierce.

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I’d have to say that the 1+ years I’ve waited to actually see this movie was well worth it. From what I understand, there’s a non-US original ending that is even more satisfying than what we saw. I can only hope that this exists on the DVD release.

What a great week of movies for me. First SoaP, now The Descent.

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UPDATE: And Lori did a fine job of not screaming like a little pansy.