The Descent movie review

The Descent is a 2005 British horror movie. I picked up this movie because it was requested that I do a review of this movie at my review of The Cave, and holy shit am I glad I found it and watched it! This is a film is about a group of adventurous thrill-seeking women. The movie starts with a three of the women doing white water rafting down a river, and afterwards one of the women Sarah, her husband, and her daughter are in a car accident, where her husband and her daughter both die. A year passes, and Juno one of the girls gets the other two women, as well as their friends Sam and Rebecca, and newcomer Holly to come to America to explore a cave in North Carolina (though the movie was filmed entirely in the UK). After a cave in blocks the women's return to the entrance, it is discovered that Juno lied to them, and they are not in fact in the cave that she told them they were going to, which was a well explored cave, instead they were in a unexplored, and unnamed cave. At this point the movie gets very claustrophobic, as the women are lost in this cave system, which at points is a very tight fit, where the women almost get stuck at times. As if the horror of being trapped in a cave with no known way out, and the darkness, and the claustrophobia isn't enough, they find out that they are not alone in the cave, and that there are creatures, that may have been human at one time, who have adapted to the caves. These creatures are blind, and hunt through their sense of hearing, and they can climb on pretty much any surface, and they are meat eaters. The movie gets even more terrifying as the women are split up and hunted through the caves...the movie builds to a very tense climax. Also there are two different endings, the UK ending, and then the US ending, because it was thought that US audiences wouldn't be okay with the darkness of the original ending. Thankfully on the DVD version that I have, it has the original UK ending on it. I love horror movies, if you have been following my reviews, you know this. I will say I am so glad that this movie was recommended to me, because I felt very uncomfortable, and anxious watching this movie, there were a lot of times that I could feel chills running through my body as I watched this. I have to say that I am terribly claustrophobic, and I have an irrational fear of being stuck in a cave, so when that happens to one of the characters, I nearly had an anxiety attack, and almost had to stop the movie. It isn't often that I actually feel scared watching a movie, but this one got me, even without the creatures. Then the creatures came in, and they were very effective as an idea that their are cavemen that never left their caves and evolved into creatures of the underworld. Everything about this movie really works and is effective. The characters are all perfectly cast and played their characters perfectly. I also love that there is a lot of character development without ever having to actually slow down the film to do so, the characters are all well developed, and you feel something for most of them, and it is actually hard watching them go through what they do. The sets are beautiful, though all of the underground sets are actually done entirely on sets built in a studio, even with that being the case, they are beautiful and very real looking. I love that the effects of this movie are mostly practical, with the crawlers all being played by people, and not digitally created. Again just everything about this movie is fantastically done. I honestly can't really think of any real negatives to say about this movie, I was honestly really impressed with it. Would I recommend this film? Yes, absolutely! This is a very effective movie, with a great story, great characters, an amazing all women cast, some great drama, some great horror, the perfect amount of gore, to be a film that doesn't resort to gross out, but relies on true horror to scare the audience. Also I love movies that don't have a nice happy ending, where everyone lives happily ever after. I just love everything about this amazing film, and I hope you all take some time to give it a viewing.