The Descent follows the exploits of a group of female Scottish spelunkers in an uncharted cave system in the Appalachian Mountains. It takes them about 30 minutes of screen time to actually get to the cave. This time is spent fleshing out the characters and laying a bit of groundwork for events to come later in the film.
Once in the cave, there are a few minutes of exploring the beauty of the cave. Then we start hearing things and seeing things before a cave-in traps our heroines in the cave. Pretty soon the monsters are revealed and the “scary parts” commence.
I put “scary parts” in quotes because the monsters aren’t really scary. They actually look quite a bit like Gollum from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. But this isn’t really a movie about monsters or a descent into a cave. It’s about the psychological descent of the main character into madness and about how trauma affects the mind. This is illustrated mostly through dream sequences and hallucinations that the main character has.
It’s pretty interesting to watch how ultimately she becomes more of a danger to her fellow spelunkers than the monsters, but it isn’t very scary. All of the jumpy moments are telegraphed and pretty predictable. This movie would fare better without the monsters and marketed as a psychological thriller, instead of as a horror movie. But once you toss monster-cavemen into the mix, the genre is sorta pre-defined for you.
Combine the above criticism with slipshod editing and the cheesiest special effects ever and you get:
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