I saw the horror pic Descent last night. It was frustrating because it had a lot of potential that was really squandered by bad directing.

Six (I think there were six) women, all nice looking of course, go spelunking in the Appalachian mountains. Their leader take them into an unexplored cave without telling anyone, and they get stuck down there. Oh, and there's a whole race of blind, albino, flesh-eating humanoids down there.

The idea of a subpopulation of humans adapting to caves is really, really cool. But they don't do shit with it. The "crawlers", as the credits refer to them, apparently don't have any linguistic ability, or culture (they may or may not have painted on the walls, but probably a long time ago), or anything resembling humanity, other than form. Whenever they're onscreen, they screech (kinda like bats), and the music ratches up, and the camera swings around violently, supposedly to scare us. It would have been much scarier if the fucking camera had been held still so we could see what they were actually doing.

It would also have been scarier if the things were smarter and actually tried to do something more than just jump on and chomp up our heroines. Imagine, for example, how creepy it would be if they wanted to make a bride out of one of them. But none of that. And that's a disappointment, because the way it was written and shot, the crawlers could have been filled in for with giant bats or wolves or damn near any wild animal. Would have been pretty much the same movie.

As it was, it was pretty so-so, and laughably silly in some parts. It had so many standard horror cliches, and the annoying burst of string music to make you jump that the whole thing just felt tired and recycled. Which again was a shame, since it really could have been a very cool, very original flick. Oh well.

As a footnote, I read one review where the reviewer said there was some sort of weird subtext involved since the crawlers were all male. I don't know which movie he was watching, because there was a scene where one of the women kills a crawler child, and the mother and her then fight. That crawler is pretty clearly a female, and of those listed in the credits, a significant number of them are female.