The Descent: Critic Reviews

Made with a connoisseur's love of muck, blood, inky darkness, and equal parts elegance and ewwww, The Descent raises the level of the post-Blair Witch, post-Open Water horror game.

The babes are buff and the scares bountiful in Neil Marshall's full-throttle horror freakout about six women on a caving expedition.

For my money, [the] first 20 or so minutes are the best in the film. Once the real adventure gets underway in the cave, things get less interesting.

[Marshall] does have a nice taste for horror imagery: The first glimpse of one of the creatures, as debased and revolting and craven as a living thing could be, will stay with you a long time.

A cult classic is born.

Not since John Sayles and Joe Dante unleashed Piranha and The Howling on Hollywood's New Morning have two features torn open the horror movie with the cut-rate ferocity and gleeful disreputability of [Neil] Marshall's Dog Soldiers and The Descent.

This is one of the scariest movies featuring female heroines since the Alien series.

The Descent seems less about female empowerment than female misery. One wonders if Marshall has issues. No males suffer here, just women who, even if they survive, won't ever be the same again.

The Descent is simply a shock-'em, shake-'em genre piece with scare scenes that, however effective, suggest cheap-shop versions of a lot we've seen before.

This intermittently effective UK horror thriller carefully establishes the psychological relationships among the women, then squanders this calibrated and generally plausible setup with a series of crude, implausible, and scattershot horror effects.

One Aliens reference in this film had me welling up: A blood-soaked Sarah raises her torch, Sigourney Weaver-like, and lets out a banshee war cry.

It plays every emotional key of fright and despair with the skill of a concertmaster at a cathedral organ.

The Descent is a sharp hammer to the head and a claw to the gut, a blood-drenched creep show that wants to eat you alive. Beware, and bon appetit.

Sorry, George Lucas, but CGI creatures usually look pretty fake; the crawlers, however, are quite realistic and creepy, especially as they skitter over the walls and roofs of the caves.

An object lesson in making a tightly-budgeted, no-star horror pic work through razor-sharp technique and committed performances alone.

Working on terrific sets with imaginative lighting effects and cinematography, Marshall creates a palpable sense of claustrophobia and danger well before murderous cave dwellers make their appearance quite a ways into the movie.

This grueling trapped-in-a-cave-with-boogey-men movie is a solid thriller, and a terrific horror experience.

While the movie has wonderful moments of unmotivated tension that make sure we're quite ill at ease from the beginning, it's also got a few too many of the kind of cheap boo-scares that indicate a director not fully trusting his grip on you.

The film redeems itself through the denouement, building on that initial psychological foundation to hint disturbingly at a metaphoric struggle with interior demons.

For horror fans and those who love things that go bump in the night, this is one not to miss.

[Marshall] expertly maps out those raw nerve endings while creating credible characters who speak and act like real people rather than the usual horror archetypes.

The movie's thrill-and-chill sequences are nasty and suspenseful, though once the creatures start to attack, the scenes get repetitive.

Marshall could very well be the Caravaggio of the B-movie.

Prepare to be scared senseless, and then, when you think you have it figured, your certainty will be shaken by scenes built to scare you even more.

Although Neil Marshall's attempt to justify the U.S. ending is admirable, the original ending is the only way out - providing a chilling bookend to a motif and suggesting what seems like cerulean-tinged peace is actually the solitary solace of madness.