The Descent is a film that shatters, for a brief hour and a half, the illusion that we know what we want to see on the screen, at all. Some people hold such movies in high esteem; the others, it seems, must be good at hiding their gratitude. The film’s weaknesses only serve to create the ideal conditions for the sort of filmgoing experience that we search out – a playground for guiltless nit-picking, which turns into a luxuriation in deficiency, which turns into a genuine appreciation, certainly not for the film itself, but for the splendid mess it leaves when its lack of ambition at all levels collides with the overambition of the director, Neil Marshall, with the result that the wide semantic boundary between 'gratuitous' and 'gratifying' is obliterated. Allowing a battle between the protagonist and a “crawler” - with tits - in a lake of blood and gristle - with an ending that apes Scorcese - is just the kind of thing The Descent does best.

To the extent that a plot summary might be necessary to hammer home some finer points, our protagonist loses her husband and daughter in a horrific highway accident, after a day of whitewater rafting with her friends, a couple of moms-kick-butt tropes who appear to be refugees from a Celexa commercial. How surprised we are when they are revealed to be two of the film’s main characters, worked in among a bunch of topically different but psychologically identical post-feminist extreme mommies who converge on a small hamlet in the Appalachians to do some serious spelunking. The group leader, an exquisitely fibrous Polynesian woman named Juno, decides, unknown to the inexperienced climbers in the group, to explore an underground cave which has no record of having been visited before. The cave proves to be an impressive bitch, even before the introduction of our bane, the digestively-addled race of creepers known (to the film) as “crawlers”. 

The “crawlers” (and we should be thankful there was no clumsy attempt to taxonomize them) are a subhuman race of scamperers who feed on wayward animals and unfortunate explorers. Anyone not familiar with the concept of a subhuman race living underground will be scared witless. The rest of us have only the grisly special effects and the apparently endless shock value of these things swinging around corners and popping into the frame from every possible angle, because they are aware that the victim’s chance of survival goes up if they are not surprised. Despite the halfhearted attempt to present the crawlers as a natural phenomenon, they still present themselves to us as supernatural. Not only because of their grotesque form and disobedience to physics, but also because they share the preternatural knack of movie ghosts and other unexplainable phenomena of popping up exactly when and where you don’t want them. (These unexplainables do this, we think, because they are preternaturally sensitive to both the deep and immediate fears of their victims.)

The movie is a moderately successful thriller - the claustrophobic tunnel scenes are legitimately terrifying - until the introduction of the crawlers. The first glimpse of a crawler, in the foreground, in silhouette, retching, in a Dantean parody, so undermines the notion that we know anything about the movie we heretofore thought ourselves to be watching that this, not the image itself, is the most plausible explanation for the simultaneous hiccup of fear from the audience. We are left to wonder if this is a symbolic representation of the protagonist’s anguish, an artsy flashback to primordial times, or some sort of wildly ambitious Protean device, until these things show up 30 minutes later and start ripping people to shreds.  In the meantime, there’s lots of teeth-gritting and bitching as the women exert considerable effort pulling themselves across chasms and climbing sheer walls, only to further discover the apparent hopelessness of their situation. This plot is riveting enough, heavy on the squirming and pretty light on the whining, and would make a decent if undistinguished nail-biter of a movie if it simply continued this way, but the proper introduction of the crawlers blows this possibility sky-high. Up to this point, the predominant sound effect, and I do mean that, has been “doing-something noise” which, since these women are draped in all kinds of sundry metal clickies, sounds like a 40-weight chain being dropped into a barrel full of thumbtacks from differing heights. The crawlers’ only digestible contribution to the movie is the addition of two new sound effects to the meager spread: a lubricious death-rattle and a combination whack-rip-hiss, careful editing of which lessens, somewhat, the difficulty of determining who is winning. Aside from careful auditory attention, there is literally no possibility of processing what is happening in a fight scene. The Descent is, happily, from the school of moviemaking that eschews the punch – kick – spit – thwack, old-fashioned way of choreographing a fight, and goes straight for the digital fuck-avalanche tactic of CGI-reaming your shivering ass until you don’t know what month it is. Every crawler scene, though, so specifically addresses the primary elements of movie-monster-oh-shit that we wonder if the filmmakers aren’t confused as to whether they’re making this for a jaded audience or a callow one - both, hopefully.

The film also does a lousy job of setting up a rivalry between the protagonist and the group leader, Juno, which has to exist if the events at the end of the movie are to be explained at all. Aside from some mild tension, which could be explained by the fact that the protagonist is recovering from a brutal psychological trauma and the group leader is a self-centered perfectionist who clearly doesn't understand the needs of anyone else, there is no early indication that the two are engaged in the sort of rivalry that would make later events likely. We do receive an unlikely boon when Juno's good luck charm is revealed to have inscribed on it an inspirational saying favored by the dead husband; however, this is so unexpected that we resist drawing the conclusion we think we are supposed to draw. Are we supposed to infer that they were having an affair? God only knows. We resist any explanations. Nor can we accept that the women just 'don't get along', because in this movie, everything in the personal sphere is as simplistic as can be. If the movie is implying an affair, then it does so in the most awkward possible way. Like most things in The Descent, hindsight reveals nothing. This movie is so thoroughly, gloriously unaccountable that we can accept almost anything. Take the physiognomy of the crawlers. The crawlers, it is explained, are congenitally blind and target their prey using echolocation, their eyesight having atrophied from generations of darkness. It is also explained that they hunt on the surface. There is no attempt made to reconcile these explanations, and only a first-time moviegoer would think to demand one. Also, the crawlers' amplified hearing seems to come at the ridiculous expense of every other faculty, as they are apparently unable to feel the heat from a butane torch inches from their back or notice that they are gripping a woman's scapula instead of a rock fixture.

We spend a lot of time here talking about “bad” movies. Myself, I sort of hate to use that term, because it seems both too complimentary and too pejorative to describe most things I would apply it to. We’re not too interested in why we like a “bad” movie; it’s sufficient to acknowledge that there’s something about it that engages us. And also, in no small part, we pride ourselves on the agility it takes to build something comedic from a wasteland of aborted jokes, inconsistencies, boring narratives, and outlandish attempts to hold the viewer’s attention. Any of these elements can be devastatingly funny by themselves, but the ability to join them in such a way that they create a personal comedic wonderland is the real payoff. Because a “bad” movie is so easy to pick apart (and I am very broadly generalizing here; there are some which really have no point of entry whatsoever), its elements can be freed from the constrictions of time and space with the most elementary consideration, leaving a cinematic tabula rasa which you can spend the next hour and a half populating with your own personal fantasies regarding what these characters say or do, because it does not matter what they say or do. Aside from this “positive” way of building oneself into a movie, there’s also the “negative” revelation of the self on screen when you see and hear something that is not just vaguely, not just approximately, but precisely an inversion of your preferences. I keep thinking back to a scene in Men At Work where Charlie Sheen, in a shot that unfortunately refers to Hitchcock, stands at the window with an air rifle, looking into an apartment across the way, and says, with mock erudition, “This pop gun allows me to aggravate a situation without actually changing the course of history.” This is by far the most articulate statement we will hear from anyone in the movie, and somewhat brilliant in itself. The combination of Rear Window, the movie apparently stepping outside of itself to deliver that line, the intent of Charlie Sheen to brandish an air rifle at a bandit, the Sheen-as-a-trashman parallel that makes thinking of Badlands unavoidable, and more than anything, “Pressure Drop”, is a cocktail that is nothing if not personally baiting.

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