Interesting things caves. In Plato’s Republic a cave is the setting for a long-winded parable about perception and reality (explained succinctly here via the medium of Akon). A Freudian interpretation would see the cave as a metaphor for the womb; a symbol of sinister female sexuality signifying the absence of a phallus and therefore the implicit threat of castration. And there are bats.
In light of this penetrating psychoanalytic insight, Neil Marshall’s 2005 film The Descent – a British horror about an all-female group of explorers who get lost on a caving expedition and do battle with vicious subterranean monsters – can be read either as an empowering feminist allegory and rejection of the patriarchal phallocentric conventions of the modern movie indusrty or, more plausably, a film about one man’s fear of vaginas.
The follow-up is released this week but disappointingly they’ve ditched the feminist angle and let some men be in it (there’s a big mean Sheriff, a good looking mountain rescuer and a guy who looks like the Australian cricket captain Ricky Ponting). I think that’s a shame really, as it means they lose the main thing that differentiates it from every other generic slasher franchise. It also gives me fewer opportunities to dredge up half-remembered tidbits from my English Literature degree.
It is still very entertaining though which is pretty rare for a sequel. Nicely shot, well acted and, in some points, genuiely terrifying.
Except I didn’t feel terrified, or entertained. I just felt massively irritated and consumed with impotent rage at the pair of spectacular arseholes sitting directly behind me who insisted on talking REALLY LOUDLY throughout the entire film. It was horrible, at one point I literally did a tut. A tut! I couldn’t believe it, I don’t think I’ve ever tutted before, it’s the most middle-class thing I’ve done in my life.
It was such a shame as it completely ruined a film I think I would otherwise have enjoyed. I normally quite like horror movies and this one – with it’s murkey claustrophobic setting, ferociously violent “crawlers” and buckets and buckets of blood, gore, guts and bits of mashed up brain – would’ve been properly scary. However, in the hierarchy of emotions, irritation will supersede terror every time. (That’s why the army makes new recruits listen to Edith Bowman on Radio 1 just before they go on missions in Afghanistan).
In many ways, there was something quite interesting about the fact these annoying cockjobs were gabbing loudly to each other throughout a film about blind cave-dwelling monsters who hone in on their human prey using sound alone. Still, I suppose appreciation of irony is a fairly intermediate-level social skill that you only really get onto once you’ve mastered the more basic ones like, say, not being an absolute cunt..
What had happened, I found out afterwards, is that there weren’t that many press people at the screening so to fill it out a bit they let (get this) ordinary members of the public in as well. Bleeeuuuuuuuurrrggh! Gross! I hate ordinary members of the public with their stupid disgusting faces and crooked teeth and rubbish clothes smeared with shit. Most of all I hate the way they DON’T EVEN WORK IN THE MEDIA. HOW DARE THEY! HOW DARE THEY NOT WORK IN THE MEDIA!! It makes me sick, physically sick to my stomach.
Anyway, I explained all this to the people sitting behind. They basically stabbed me in the face.
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