For months now I have been hearing that The Decent is one of the most frightening horror films ever made. That’s it’s just as scary as Alien when it first came out. Rumor has it that the studio has even gone as far as to have given the green light for a sequel before the film was released here in the United States. OK! So all this hype really had me thinking that I was about to see the best horror film ever made. But I also heard that the U.K. version of this film has a different ending that the U.S. version did. I saw the U.S. version obviously, however I do know how the U.K. version ends, which is different, but not all that relevant.
So anyway is The Decent the best horror film ever made? Not in my mind. Is it scary? Yeah it is, but for myself the environment they were in was scary, but the creatures were not. So what’s this film about? Well I’ll quote my ever faithful reviewer Egregious Gurnow whom below wrote a wonderful synopsis of the film.
Six females reunite a year after Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) loses her husband, Paul (Oliver Milburn), and daughter, Jessica (Molly Kayll), in an automobile accident. All the women being extreme sports fanatics, they opt to drive to Chattanooga National Park in order to go spelunking in the North Carolina segment of the Appalachians. However, things awry after Juno (Natalie Mendoza) reveals she intentionally led her friends into an uncharted cave–whose entry point just collapsed–in hopes of conquering and thereby placing her name to it before the collective discovers that they are being hunted by subterranean creatures.
Thanks E.G. owe you yet another one.
So there’s the plot in a nutshell for ya. I honestly thought the script had it highs and lows. The beginning was all full of character development, thrown right in our faces. Mainly focusing on Sarah and Juno. The rest of the females have their own way about them. One of them is a medical student, the other an extreme sports junkie, the other two are more or less just along for the ride. One of them being Sarah’s best friend. Then the script get’s better as the six ladies drive, then hike to the cave. We pretty much after that get a discovery channel documentary of caves, before the real terror starts to begin. So pretty much the script starts off with fun, then death, then more fun, then more death.
What really scared the hell out of me in this film was the cave environment it’s self. There is one scene where the girls on there stomachs crawling though a small crack going from one large part of the cave to another large part. While each women struggles there way though you can see sediment falling from above them, indicating that this small crack their barely making it though can clasps at any time. There is also a scene in which the cave drops off into nowhere, and they are forced to use their remaining climbing gear to scale the ceiling to make it to the other side. Those moment in the film are what made me feel claustrophobic and uncomfortable. As for the creatures, the first thing that came to my mind when one of them is shown for the first time drinking water was: Holy shit it’s Golum from Lord of the Rings. Totally did not scare me at all. And as the film went on and more cave creature started to appear, they did have this Ork look to them that didn’t scare me at all. However there is a scene that involves a major blood bath, a few of the creature eating some of our cast and so on, that most of the people in the theater were screaming and awing over. So I can see how the basic person would find it to be a scary film. But the cave it self scared me more than the creatures living in it.
Another thing I wanted to mention about the story is that it’s very similar to a book I read this past year from Mike Laimo titled “Deep in the Darkness” which is soon to be made into a film as well. In the book there are creatures who live in an underground cave system that take over a small New England Town, although the stories are a bit different, and the creatures in the book are far more intelligent, and not to mention more brutal than the ones in The Decent. I could not help but ponder the fact that reading this book, which scared the crap out of may, made me immune to the creatures in the film. The whole time I was watching The Decent, I just could not get how similar the whole creature in the cave was to Deep in the Darkness. (And just so you all know, Deep in the Darkness was written before the script for The Decent even excited).
The acting is pretty good in this flick, I thought that the small cast of women did a great job acting in this film. This had to be one of those acting gigs that involved working in very hard and sometimes uncomfortable conditions. So my hats off to them. The special make-effects were very good, and I liked the use of set design with al the animal and human remains and skeletal remains all over the creature’s part of the cave. The Blood pool scene was especially good. The Creature effects were very good as well, very detailed costume work on them. My only problem was with some of the CGI effects used in this film, which you’ll undoubtedly be able to point out.
Overall, The Decent is a film that does have plenty of scary moments, it may be one of the scariest films ever made, but it’s not. It has it’s moments. On an overall grand scale I liked this film, I had a fun time watching it, but it did have it flaws.
-Horror Bob
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
