QUICK VERDICT :

Neil Marshall confirms the promise of his patchy debut Dog Soldiers with this contrived but efficient shocker. The adults-only 18 certificate allows Marshall to indulge his taste for explicit gore, but the confusing, artsy-fartsy conclusion is a disappointing, ill-advised letdown. Nevertheless, for Marshall - if not his valiant pot-holing characters - it's still a case of onward and upward...




NOT-SO-QUICK VERDICT:

I normally can't stand reviews - or articles of any other kind of - which lazily kick off with a dictionary definition, but in this case I do think it's justified. My battered old edition of R F Patterson's Standard English Dictionary features the following entry for the noun descent:            

            Act of descending; declivity; invasion; a passing from an ancestor to an
            heir; lineage; distance from the common ancestor; descendants; a rank
            in the scale of subordination.

My copy of this dictionary is undated, but I reckon it was published in the late seventies: I've written my name in block capitals along the edge of the pages, with a topical caricature of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev inside the O and the date 30th May 1980, 11.25pm. Up late for a nine-year-old?  Well, it was a Friday night and I was always allowed to stay up and watch the horror films which were screened on my local commercial channel, Tyne Tees TV. I'm guessing that, on that very Friday night about 15 miles away, another precocious lad called Neil of very similar age was watching the very same film - probably an Amicus compilation shocker, or a lurid Hammer gothic.

Neil Marshall was born in Newcastle on 25th May, 1980, and judging by his two films as a writer-director - Dog Soldiers and now The Descent - he was weaned on exactly the same horror-heavy cinematic diet as myself. 25 years on, we're both making money from our youthful obsession: he's making films, I'm writing about them. If things had panned out a little differently, perhaps it would have been the other way around - and this proximity of circumstance (one which I don't share with any other director) makes it hard for me to maintain the usual critical objectivity. Hence the first-person voice I've adopted for this review: cards on the table, etc.

By any standards, however, The Descent clearly doesn't live up to its title: it's a step upward from the decidedly overrated Dog Soldiers. Marshall struggled to harness his gore-soaked inclinations within the strait-jacket of a 15 certificate for his squaddies-Vs-werewolves debut, and his weaknesses as a director - especially his tin ear for dialogue - made for an uneven but promising low-budget Brit-shocker. Dog Soldiers found considerable success financially: it did pretty well at the UK box-office, very well on rental and retail DVD, and achieved a certain cult success at European horror festivals and even further afield - Harry Knowles' website Ain't It Cool News has been host to the ravings of many enthusiastic fans.

All this put Marshall in a solid position for his follow-up: rejecting the option of the Dog Soldiers sequel (subtitled Fresh Meat, it's supposedly in production at the moment), he instead chose a variation on similar material. This time instead of a bunch of lads lost in the countryside and encountering an ancient evil, we have a bunch of lasses lost under the countryside (they're on a cave-exploration holiday) and, yes, encountering an ancient evil. Character-development is breezily basic - the central figure is Shauna MacDonald's Sarah, deeply traumatised by the death of her husband and child in a car-accident glimpsed in the picture's disconcerting prologue.

Crucially, Marshall this time enjoys the liberty endowed by the all-too-rare '18' certificate: I'm guessing that, like me, when he was little the pictures he most wondered about and dreamed of seeing at his local fleapits were the 'X' rated horrors, not the 'AA's. He certainly doesn't stint on the grisly gore in The Descent - seemingly channeling the hardcore likes of Lucio Fulci, he stages several stomach-churning set-pieces in which the women take on and, discovering their 'inner Sigourney Weaver' messily best the cannibal/zombie creatures they encounter down below. The nuts and bolts of the plot are perfunctory: we're supposedly in Appalachia (nod to Deliverance), where our 'six chicks with picks' get themselves lost in an unexplored cave-system which turns out to be the home-turf of... well, I won't give the game away here.

Suffice it to say that they aren't alone down there - cue claustrophobic, deliberately badly-lit sequences in which our heroines discover exactly who or rather what it is they've stumbled across. Genre references abound - at one point the 'explanation' (never actually spelled out) seems to hint towards Gary Sherman's 1972 Underground (capitals intentional) semi-classic Death Line. Elsewhere Marshall is unapologetic about his 'borrowings' - though he might perhaps feel a pang of retrospective shame at the way one long sequence lifts Ennio Morricone's peerlessly ominous score for John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) pretty much intact.

Such respectful cap-doffing is all par for the course, however. Marshall is edging towards discovering his own cinematic 'voice', and at the moment many of his effects are (in stark contrast to the subtlety of the title and the UK theatrical poster) rather thuddingly crude - the hyperkinetic editing during the 'attack' sequences is especially offputting and confusing. He has learned from his mistakes first time around, however - The Descent is notably lighter on dialogue than Dog Soldiers, and that can only be a plus.

Marshall is nevertheless still some way from the finished article, script-wise - he tacks on a gratingly smart-arsed, incongruously "arty" coda which undoes much of the viscerally powerful, technically impressive, convincingly effective stuff that's gone before, and seems designed to send his audiences scratching their heads and trading theories as they head for the exits.

But The Descent isn't really a film that stands much thinking about. In what may be yet another homage to yet another north-eastern movie-buff in Ridley Scott, the entrance to the cave does look rather like female genitalia, and once they 'go down' there's no shortage of phallic stalactites (if they're the ones that point upwards) in a picture which is very heavy on blood-spattered penetrations. We can no doubt look forward to numerous scholarly deconstructions of The Descent - but as Marshall's heroines discover to their cost, it's often safest to settle for the surface...

Neil Young
5th July, 2005

THE DESCENT : [6/10] : UK 2005 : Neil MARSHALL : 100 mins
seen at the Motion Picture Company, London (UK), 29th June 2005 - press show