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THE DESCENT (2005) Director: Neil Marshall Hacktors: Shauna McDonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder. Rating: Cutting Remarks: Brit director Neil Marshall delivers the follow-up to his cracking werewolf flick Dog Soldiers, and once again it's a gutsy thrill-ride. Whereas Soldiers saw a bunch of male soldiers facing off against lycanthropes in the Scottish highlands, this one has six extremely daring women going caving in the Appalachian Mountains.          The first few minutes of this film are fantastic. Without wanting to give anything away, it's one of the cleverest, most horribly naturalistic uses of CGI I've ever seen. It has considerable bearing on the main character Sarah (McDonald), who a year later joins her friends in those caves. While the team are destined to run into a horde of carnivorous, humanoid predators underground, they undergo plenty of torment before the creatures even show up. They're trapped in claustrophobically tight passages, struggle to cross a chasm and, in one case, suffer a nasty leg break.          When the extremely frightening beasts do show up, the movie goes haywire, in the best possible way. One of the things I like most about The Descent is that it's needlessly violent and gory. With his considerable ability as a director, Marshall could have made this a far 'classier', more mainstream proposition, which demonstrated all that 'less is more' nonsense. But to his credit, he's made a hardcore horror flick which starts to resemble The Evil Dead by the end, as eyes are gouged and blood flies like sea-spray. There's a subplot revolving around deception, though, which doesn't quite pay off satisfactorily: you can't help feeling that the supposed 'villain' receives overly harsh treatment. Furthermore, the ending is annoyingly abstract. Still, there's no getting away from the fact that this is one of the horror films around which actually manages to frighten and disturb (see also: The Devil's Rejects and Shallow Ground). Release Date: In UK cinemas from July 8, 2005. [Reviews Menu] © Copyright Slasherama 2002-present