film | Ate below

In THE DESCENT, six female buddies rent a cabin in the Appalachians to gab, bond and spelunk a year after their previous sporting-adventure getaway ended in a car wreck that killed one gal's accompanying husband and young daughter. It sounds positively chick-flick-ian, alright, and for a while, The Descent looks to be on the verge of bursting with enough estrogen for a Lifetime TV-movie marathon. and then director/writer Neil Marshall (the U.K. werewolf tale Dog Soldiers) dumps his nasty little bag of tricks onto the table, at which point the film rapidly segues into full-tilt nightmare fuel — lean, mean and obscenely creepy-crawly.

These athletic ladypals — including the spooked widow (MI-5's Shauna Macdonald) and a cocky daredevil (Moulin Rouge's Natalie Mendoza) with questionable motives — rappel deep into an uncharted cavern, where, once the movie exhausts its obligatory parade of fake boo! moments (phew, it was only a bad dream! a perturbed bird! a horde of bats! my sneaky girlfriend!), incredibly real scares await them. In concept, The Descent ain't nothing terribly novel or groundbreaking, but what keeps it from being another inept subterranean twist on Alien (remember last summer's The Cave?) is the canny way Marshall depicts his protagonists as resourceful, scrappy, intelligent personalities, provides hints of friction bubbling beneath their cheery camaraderie, and then throws an increasingly volatile cavalcade of horrors into the mix to bring the characters' dissension to a frenzied boil: claustrophobia! hallucinations! mutiny! abandonment! Ravenous monsters that look like the creature prosthetics of Bram Stoker's Dracula mated with the ashy beings from Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy" music video!

Oh, and speaking of Alien, and at the risk of cinematic sacrilege, The Decent rates a bit higher on the eek-o-meter than ridley scott's seminal 1979 sci-fi thriller. At least Sigourney Weaver and crew had flamethrowers and overhead lighting on their side as they combed their spaceship for the intergalactic beastie that unwelcomely hitched a ride. Comparatively, the heroines of The Decent careen through pitch-black underground tunnels armed with just signal flares and mountain-climbing equipment, and you've gotta get pretty close to something to swipe at it with a pickaxe. Not afraid of the dark? Heh. You will be. A-

Note: For whatever reason, the current American theatrical release of The Decent — a British production that opened overseas in 2005 — lops off the last 60 seconds of Marshall's original cut. The U.S. version is good for a fast jolt, but it's the sweet/sad imagery of the U.K. finale that ties everything together and truly sticks with you. It can be viewed here.