Pleasantly surprised by a movie I thought would be bad.
I twittered about this last week, but recently I watched a movie that I expected to be fun in a B-grade, horror flick kind of way, and ended up better than I expected. Not only were there some scenes at the beginning that actually got my heart racing and my nails biting into my palms — and they had nothing to do with cave-dwelling mutants, but all to do with claustrophobia (which I don’t even suffer) — but the real surprise was the cast and the characters.
That movie was The Descent, directed by Neil Marshall and starring Shauna MacDonald (Sarah) and Natalie Mendoza (Juno).
The story was a little slow to get going, setting up tension between the main female characters (there are pretty much only women in this movie), but once they are in the cave I loved it. And it wasn’t the scare factor: it was the knowledge that they had women here who could kick my ass forward and backward, then start in on any action hero and come out hurting, but not without giving the dude a bloody mouth first.
I remember a moment the first time I was watching Scream, when what’s-her-face’s character just started whaling on the bad guy. Fighting back, and hurting him. My god, I loved the movie for that. But this one? Takes that to another level.
And it’s not like they are suddenly, inexplicably ninjas — just strong women desperate to save their lives. They kick, they punch, they scream, they get hurt, they bite.
Even the “bad” one — the one who was sleeping with her friend’s husband before he died (this isn’t a spoiler because it’s obvious from the beginning and he gets killed in the first scenes) — kicks ass. She kicks the MOST ass, and I have kind of a girl-crush on Natalie Mendoza now.
Anyway. I want more movies like this*.
(Also, if I’m ever in a cave fighting off a bunch of mutant cave-dwellers with an pick-ax or whatever that was, and you come up behind me real quiet-like, I’m probably going to accidentally kill you, too. And I’d feel bad, but I’d also think “Yeah, okay, she’s dead — I’ll leave her and try to come back to her later.” And if the “good” character later effed up my knee with that ax because I’d slept with her husband and accidentally killed the idiot who came up behind me in a dark cave, I’d think that she deserved the UK ending, too.)
ETA: *I heard they are making a sequel. Considering the ending, that’s not EXACTLY what I mean by “wanting more movies like this”.
