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100It's the most intense, unpredictable and thrilling cinematic experience I've had the pleasure to squirm through in ages.
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91The director of The Descent is savvy enough to suggest even more than he shows. And he's old-school enough to load up on glimpses of good, clean, gruesome gore.
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91A nasty little tube of frozen horror concentrate.
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90Neil Marshall's horrifically terrific The Descent cannily recasts 1972's "Deliverance" as a female-bonding thriller with some "Hills Have Eyes"-style mutant terror tossed in for truly harrowing effect.
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88Though the film's downbeat ending was softened for U.S. release, it's still a long way from happy.
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83The most exhilaratingly horrifying movie to come out in years.
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83The Descent sustains a level of intensity that most horror films can barely muster for five minutes.
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80Brutal, bloody, terrifying, astonishing... And so tense it'll leave you aching. The most significant Brit chiller since "28 Days Later."
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75Prepare to be scared senseless, and then, when you think you have it figured, your certainty will be shaken by scenes built to scare you even more.
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75This is one of the scariest movies featuring female heroines since the "Alien" series, and what makes it uniquely scary is where these women are -- in tunnels two miles under ground -- when they realize they are not alone.
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75Easily the summer's scariest movie.
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Amid this unrelenting ferocity, Marshall gives his characters emotional depth, and elicits terrific performances from the cast.
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75Marshall takes a modest budget and a concept that isn't all that original and produces a frightening, intelligent and sexy thriller.
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75A cult classic is born.
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75This one is a creepy white-knuckle excursion into horror, where even the "boo!" moments are so well developed that they cause a jolt.
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75The Descent is bloody, disturbing, and genuinely frightening--you'll be very happy to leave that dark theater.
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75For those who like their horror served straight up with no ironic chaser, The Descent is a tasty cup of torment.
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75At the heart of the film, beyond the human/crawler conflict, is the suppressed tension between Sarah and Juno. That Marshall bothered to include such a fillip sets him apart from run-of-the-mill scaremongers; it makes me want to see what else he's done and will do.
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70All in all, this is an accessible art house horror film whose trailer and premise do not do justice to the end result.
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70While the women's battle with the cave creatures has fine jump-from-your-seat moments, it gradually becomes the same chase flick horror fans have seen dozens of times. OK, it's a darn good one in most respects.
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In the great B tradition, Marshall gets a lot out of nothing.
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70What follows is a sensationally entertaining escalation of frights, the kind that make you wiggle and squirm as you alternately laugh at your own gullibility and marvel at the filmmaker's cunning and craft.
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70The chills and spills keep comin' to agreeable effect in Brit-made scarefest The Descent.
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70Marshall keeps the film lean and focused. He does have a nice taste for horror imagery.
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67The Descent may not be everything you've heard, but man, it's also a lot of things you haven't.
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63You either go for a movie like this or you don't. But though I didn't like it much, I've got to admit that The Descent is a nerve-jangler.
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63Eventually, though, the monsters come out -- blind, snarling cave-dwellers, looking much like Gollum's bigger kin -- and The Descent becomes a simple exercise in guessing who, if anyone, will survive.
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50It's made expressly for fans of unmitigated gore.
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50Compulsively watchable, with its fair share of effective sledgehammer shocks; it just isn't very good.
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50This intermittently effective UK horror thriller carefully establishes the psychological relationships among the women, then squanders this calibrated and generally plausible setup with a series of crude, implausible, and scattershot horror effects.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 97 out of 127
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Mixed: 13 out of 127
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Negative: 17 out of 127
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10The best horror movie ever !
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ZS5