BIFFF - The Descent and Evil Aliens

Ah, now that was better.


I'd seen The Descent on DVD when it came out on DVD in the UK a couple of months ago and loved it. When I saw that it was playing at the festival I thought it would be good to see how it plays in the dark with an audience, especially one as good as the Brussels lunatics. And it really does work, Neil Marshal has produced a tense, brutal film that will become a high water mark for modern horror.

The film follows a group of six women who get together for a weekend of caving as an attempt to get back the group dynamic that existed before a tragic accident that affected Sarah and her family. Marshall sets up the characters nicely in their pre-adventure interactions and he is well served by a good cast. They head off into the caves and of course, something goes wrong and they get trapped. The first hour of the film is tense and very claustrophobic as the women go deeper and deeper into the caves trying to find a way out. The tension is very well handled and there are little clues as to what will come later scattered around. There is also an indication that Marshall is not afraid of the red stuff during a excruciatingly painful broken leg sequence that had the entire audience screaming 'noooooooooooooooooo' and averting their eyes.

So, we are now well into the film and it been a cracking adventure story with some interesting characters and a mounting sense of panic that maybe they will not make it out.

Then all hell breaks loose.

There are several genuine jump scares in the space of several minutes as the other inhabitants of the caves are revealed and they are not happy creatures. The film then gets brutal. Both in the physical and emotional sense as our heroines are separated, attacked and do their best to stay alive. After a fabulously well done little twist you realise that Marshal is not going to hold back and that everybody is at risk and that anything can happen and probably will.

There is a lot to be said for Marshall's direction, he make wonderful use of the whole frame, filling it with darkness and just a little corner of light where the action is taking place, his use of shadows and different lighting sources. A few nice little nods to other films such as Alien, Psycho and Carrie, but done in an nice subtle way. His writing should not be passed over though, as opposed to An American Haunting for example, he has created actual characters that you start to care about so when incredibly nasty things start to happen to them, it hurts on several levels. And to make matters worse for the audience, the women don't really make any wrong decisions, they do exactly what you probably would do in the same situation. This makes it a lot more realistic as it's so much easier to identify with somebody when you agree with their actions. To see that making the right choice is probably not going to help you anyway just makes it even more distressing.

Then there is the ending. This seems to have divided people, personally I love it and the audience seemed to agree if the applause that started as the final shot came on screen was anything to go by. Marshall confirmed in the Q&A afterwards that the final shot that featured in the UK release and on the UK DVD will not appear in the US version. He said that it was just so that he could see how it works with the film ending 2 minutes earlier but I can't help but think that there was maybe some studio involvement in that decision as the cut would give it a more traditional end as opposed to the rather lovely one that it has here. During his talk, Marshall also said that it has not yet been submitted to the censors in the US, so finger crossed that when you do get it, the brutality is intact.

This is one of the best horror films I have seen for a long long time and it seemed that the audience agreed as they were extremely vocal in their appreciation. Marshall took away a prize for Dog Soldiers here back in 2001 and I'm not sure what else there is this year that could stop him doing the same with The Descent.


I skipped the next film because a) I wanted to see the Q&A with Neil Marshal and Saskia Mulder (Saskia Mulder is a lovely person by the way) and b) it was Bloodrayne by Uwe Boll. I refuse to pay money to see that man's films as it only encourages him to make more of them.

The midnight showing was Evil Aliens by Jake West and it's great 'midnight after a few drinks' fodder. Made on a tiny budget, West is obviously inspired by 'Bad Taste', 'Evil Dead', 'Braindead', etc. While his film never reaches the heights of splatstick attained by those classics, it is still a lot of fun as long as you don't set your expectations too high.

The film is set on a small island off the Welsh coast where a girl is sleeping with a visiting tourist in the middle of a ring of standing stones called 'The Devil's Teeth' when they are suddenly abducted by the titular aliens, one extreme anal probing later and her beau is dead and she's back on earth, pregnant with an alien love-child. Cue the arrival of Michelle Fox and her ridiculously low-cut tops as the presenter of a cable television show about the paranormal to do a piece on the abduction. She brings along a motley crew of actors, a true UFO geek and a cameraman and sound man duo (the soundman's t-shirt, when revealed, go a good laugh from the crowd.). Along with the heavily pregnant girl and her inbred brothers (who only speak in Welsh, subtitled luckily) they then have to fight off an alien invasion.

West was asked why he set his film on a farm and he replied that it's because there are so many sharp implements available. That there are and they are pretty much all used at some point during this humorous gorefest including a nice piece with a combine harvester (and of course the music over the top of that sequence is exactly what a UK audience would expect it to be). The red stuff flows all over the place in this as arms are ripped off, heads torn off and a crowd-pleasing moment involving a very large wooden post going through somebody. Lengthwise. What plot there is is not really important as all this film is about is trying to get more and more over the top as it goes on.

So, while not perfect, it's still fun to see with some like-minded friends and a couple of beers.