Neil Marshall
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Maybe that's why, at the climactic moment when a bloodied arm reaches up through the weedy ground for the light of day, Marshall himself seems a tad overwrought — cancelling his account with Deliverance and taking on a whole new debt to Carrie.
This is also when the filmic allusions start piling up into their own sort of zombie brigade: scare quotes, if you like, from Don't Look Now, Carrie, Apocalypse Now, The Blair Witch Project, the Gollum sequences in The Lord of the Rings, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original Alien, and in one sudden flash-reveal of a whole brigade of crouching monsters, a direct lift from Aliens.
They include explicit allusions (in addition to the movies already mentioned above) to " Picnic at Hanging Rock ," " Carrie ," “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ,” " The Third Man ," "The Fourth Man," " Don't Look Now ," " The Blair Witch Project " " Vertigo ," " Apocalypse Now "... and plenty more.
Until an overwrought finish out of Carrie, Marshall keeps you guessing with nightmare-making skill.
The final sections of The Descent which manage to evoke Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976), Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) and even Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses (2003) are bloody, brutal and tense.
Buckets of blood are spilled, including one memorable image that pays loving homage to the final scene of Carrie.
There’s a scene where the crew is crawling through a tight space in the lab wreckage that evokes the claustrophobic panic of The Descent , and the slow reveal of the final water monster baddie is spookily reminiscent of the Queen reveal in Aliens .
By the third time that happens, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the movie is being guided along rails like a theme park ride; while the story evokes everything from “Alien” and “The Abyss” to “Sphere” and “The Descent,” the raw functionality of its telling ultimately positions “Underwater” closer to Disneyland’s “Tower of Terror” than anything else (and thanks to Disney’s recent acquisition of 20th Century Fox, this is technically a Disney joint).
Struggling through wreckage in scenes that recall Neil Marshall’s The Descent , she eventually winds up in the company of a group of comfortingly familiar survivors, including: grim Captain Lucien (French star Vincent Cassel); panicky biologist Emily Haversham (Jessica Henwick); nice nerd Liam Smith (John Gallagher Jr.); snarky grunt Paul Abel (snarky T.J. Miller); and the unfortunately one-dimensional Rodrigo Nagenda (Mamoudou Athie).
Taking cues from films like Alien, Cloverfield, The Descent and Leviathan, among others, Underwater would have easily drowned if it hadn’t borrowed some of the best elements from the aquatic horror movies it hoped to emulate.
Normally, obscuring special effects and not allowing full sight of a monster would infuriate me, but it works here, much in the same way it did with the cave dwellers in The Descent.
Unfortunately, that isn’t what happened and the result is a slice of aquatic ALIEN-sploitation (that also borrows from PITCH BLACK and THE DESCENT) with some cool stuff but is mostly frustrating and unmemorable.
Bodies and cave-scaling implements drop with loud cracks; portentous music telegraphs just about every surprise coming; the sightless goo-covered "crawlers" who live in the cave recesses (but who occasionally go topside to hunt) drop abruptly, with "Alien"-like grace, into the camera frame.
That general synopsis will probably sound like a very generic horror movie premise, and though director Neil ("Dog Soldiers") Marshall's influences are somewhat obvious, but veering more towards thrillers like "Deliverance" and "Alien" than out-and-out horror movies.
This is also when the filmic allusions start piling up into their own sort of zombie brigade: scare quotes, if you like, from Don't Look Now, Carrie, Apocalypse Now, The Blair Witch Project, the Gollum sequences in The Lord of the Rings, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original Alien, and in one sudden flash-reveal of a whole brigade of crouching monsters, a direct lift from Aliens.
But the best way to illustrate the smashing success of The Descent may not be to compare it to a classic like Alien -- though this movie surely will earn a spot in the pantheon next to it -- but to last summer’s very similar, if desperately unscary, The Cave .
There have been a lot of comparisons to "Alien", but "Descent" is more like "Jaws" in a cave.
The final sections of The Descent which manage to evoke Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976), Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) and even Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses (2003) are bloody, brutal and tense.
47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)
Directed by Johannes Roberts
influenced by The Descent (2005)
Themes Plot
If you’re looking for a connection to the original Mandy Moore-starring film, there isn’t one aside from how Johannes again tries – and fails – to match the intense below-the-surface claustrophobic atmosphere of The Descent, another obvious inspiration.
It also doubles down overt references to Neil Marshall’s low-key 2005 classic The Descent .
(You can use air pockets on the ceilings as a secondary supply of air!) You’ll also likely read a lot of reviews referring to the film as The Descent with sharks, and while that description is not at all inaccurate, Uncaged lacks the sophistication and nuanced character development that made that Neil Marshall masterpiece so special.
Even without the threat of real sharks, these moments that featured those dark and cramped passageways were enough to make me feel on edge, reminding me of the same way I felt the first time I watched The Descent .
With Uncaged , Roberts smartly goes in a much different direction, utilizing the sequel’s very specific locale (submerged Mayan ruins) as a means to incite feelings of claustrophobia and disorientation, resulting in an experience that’s akin to if The Descent took place underwater.
At times, this tale of four young women trying to rescue each other in an underwater maze — as opposed to the two caged vacation divers of “47 Meters Down” — suggests a variation on “The Descent,” the 2005 spelunking thriller.
As Above, So Below (2014)
Directed by John Erick Dowdle
influenced by The Descent (2005)
Plot Visuals Themes
As far as horror movie premises go, that's a decent one, even if it is heavily referential, giving shout outs to everything from Neil Marshall's masterful subterranean chiller "The Descent" to the aforementioned "Flatliners," and a whole bunch of movies in between (the opening awkwardly apes "The Da Vinci Code," among others).
It’s a real shame, too, because director John Erick Dowdle–whose credits include 2008’s muddled Quarantine and 2010’s effective Devil— creates moments that recall the claustrophobic terror of the awesome spelunking epic The Descent .
In fact, the first part of As Above recalls the unnerving underground discomfort of The Descent, another caves-are-terrifying thriller.
In terms of the sheer claustrophobia seeping from its every pore, "As Above, So Below" reminds favorably of 2006's terrifying cave-diving thriller " The Descent ."
Instead, it inspires thoughts of the superior "The Descent," a genre classic that involved a group of women trapped in a cave.
He certainly borrows a few lessons from Niel Marshall’s The Descent – and then, takes those ideas a step further – using the setting of subterranean exploration as THE principal scare source and threat throughout the film.
The Ritual (2017)
Directed by David Bruckner
influenced by The Descent (2005), Dog Soldiers (2002)
Visuals Plot
Utilizing the incredible landscape for some truly beautiful images, Bruckner’s film (based on novel of the same name) mixes elements of things we’ve seen before, executed maturely, confidently, and most importantly—effectively, as vibes reminiscent of (but not riffing on) The Blair Witch Project & The Descent covered in a rural folk-horror blanket of The Witch & The Wicker Man, all framed with a theme of guilt.
With the tragedy in the guys’ recent past, The Ritual recalls yet another horror movie, Neil Marshall’s indispensable The Descent .
Though the plot recalls The Blair Witch Project, the film it most resembles stylistically is the superb The Descent.
However, David Bruckner’s film leans most heavily on The Descent.
Based on Adam Nevill's 2011 novel of the same name, David Bruckner's feature debut (produced by Kiwi favourite Andy Serkis) The Ritual (streaming on Netflix from February 9) offers a smorgasbord of Swedish-set horrors, which, while nothing especially new (the set-up is essentially The Blair Witch Project by way of Trollhunter, The World's End, The Wicker Man and The Descent), is elevated by screenwriter Joe Barton's (TV's Humans) sharp writing and some nifty editing and camerawork.
“The Ritual” is what happens if you put “The Descent,” “The Witch” and “Blair Witch” in a blender, and I mean that as a good thing.
The denouement is pretty clear when survivor Sarah bubbles, head first, out of a pool of glop in much the same way a possessed Martin Sheen bobbed to the river surface before slaying Brando in "Apocalypse Now."
The final sections of The Descent which manage to evoke Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976), Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) and even Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses (2003) are bloody, brutal and tense.
This is also when the filmic allusions start piling up into their own sort of zombie brigade: scare quotes, if you like, from Don't Look Now, Carrie, Apocalypse Now, The Blair Witch Project, the Gollum sequences in The Lord of the Rings, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original Alien, and in one sudden flash-reveal of a whole brigade of crouching monsters, a direct lift from Aliens.
They include explicit allusions (in addition to the movies already mentioned above) to " Picnic at Hanging Rock ," " Carrie ," “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ,” " The Third Man ," "The Fourth Man," " Don't Look Now ," " The Blair Witch Project " " Vertigo ," " Apocalypse Now "... and plenty more.
Marshall is also an astute 'borrower' of other films, from the piton clipping suspense of "Cliffhanger," to the video camera revelations of "The Blair Witch Project" to a combined "Carrie"/"Apocalypse Now" moment that wows with its audacity.
Along with some rather pleasing homages to classic movies (including, as far as this reviewer could spot, Apocalypse Now and Carrie) The Descent boasts fantastic action scenes, nail biting horror, impressive acting and a couple of darkly comic moments that ever-so-slightly ease the almost unbearable tension.
This is also when the filmic allusions start piling up into their own sort of zombie brigade: scare quotes, if you like, from Don't Look Now, Carrie, Apocalypse Now, The Blair Witch Project, the Gollum sequences in The Lord of the Rings, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original Alien, and in one sudden flash-reveal of a whole brigade of crouching monsters, a direct lift from Aliens.
The material provided here is paper thin: After a tragic prologue lifted from the screenplay structures of "The Changeling" "Don't Look Now" and "Dead Calm", "The Descent" settles into it's main narrative of six young ladies who decide to reclaim a sense of youthful danger in their responsible adult lives by going on a caving expedition in the Appalachian mountains.
They include explicit allusions (in addition to the movies already mentioned above) to " Picnic at Hanging Rock ," " Carrie ," “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ,” " The Third Man ," "The Fourth Man," " Don't Look Now ," " The Blair Witch Project " " Vertigo ," " Apocalypse Now "... and plenty more.
I'd replace The Shining with Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now, however, in that there's a suggestion throughout that the ghost of Sarah's child is trying to warn her.
An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Directed by John Landis
influenced Dog Soldiers (2002)
Visuals Themes
I’d also like to commend Dog Soldiers for featuring some of the best werewolf designs this side of An American Werewolf in London and The Howling—a feat most modern lycanthrope films just haven’t quite achieved (although Late Phases gets pretty damned close).
While last year's " Ginger Snaps " resurrected the werewolf movie for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer teen audience, "Dog Soldiers" returns to the kind of lycanthrope comedy-horror that hasn't been seen since John Landis' "An American Werewolf in London".
"Dog Soldiers" pays homage to "Wolfen," "Evil Dead,"and "An American Werewolf in London," though I wouldn't put it in the same caliber because it was too clichéd and lacked the same intensity as the others.
The werewolf genre has been known to churn out serious-minded films, but the majority of those fail miserably (last year's much-talked-about Ginger Snaps wasn't nearly as much fun as it should have been) - with comedic films of this genre left to pick up the slack (the most influential werewolf movies of the last 25 years are undoubtedly An American Werewolf in London and The Howling).
The material provided here is paper thin: After a tragic prologue lifted from the screenplay structures of "The Changeling" "Don't Look Now" and "Dead Calm", "The Descent" settles into it's main narrative of six young ladies who decide to reclaim a sense of youthful danger in their responsible adult lives by going on a caving expedition in the Appalachian mountains.
All right, so I never figured out exactly where all the copper pipes came from (an itinerant plumber maybe?), but the scene is quick, nasty and manages to evoke both Peter Medak's The Changeling (1980) and Paul Verhoeven's The Fourth Man (1983).
Wingard, whose films “You’re Next” and “The Guest” show him to be a talented genre stylist, is purely in homage mode here; there’s even a touch of “The Descent” when he sends actress Callie Hernandez crawling into a very tight space.
Wingard has assembled a decent cast and he is certainly skilled enough to replicate the dynamics of Project, along the way replicating an unnervingly claustrophobic scene from The Descent.
Lisa follows and has an adventure with the underground tunnels in a sequence right out of "The Descent."
It’s panic attack-inducing — although less so than the very similar sequence in Neil Marshall’s cave monsters movie “The Descent,” which had the added element of the roof about to cave in, as well as the novelty of doing it first and even better.
Minor nods to The Descent and the horror manga of Junji Ito serve the film well, but just like everything else in the film, they go nowhere.
For example, there’s a chilling claustrophobia-inducing sequence that’s straight out of The Descent, while a particularly nasty injury offers a potential new source of horror before being abruptly dropped.
(Along with "Alien" and "The Blair Witch Project," the film has a definite "Deliverance" vibe.)
That general synopsis will probably sound like a very generic horror movie premise, and though director Neil ("Dog Soldiers") Marshall's influences are somewhat obvious, but veering more towards thrillers like "Deliverance" and "Alien" than out-and-out horror movies.
The trek into the wilderness to highlight their isolation, the discovery of the animal carcass to bring home the idea that these people of modernity are about to be reintroduced to their mortal animalism...every time-honoured and weather-beaten convention is paid proper obeisance by genre-loving Marshall, who has, in fact, name-checked Deliverance, Alien , and The Shining as prime inspirations/sources for this film, which is honest of him and mostly accurate.
And just as films like Deliverance explored the darkest corners of masculinity, so does The Descent deliver a sobering but intense treatise on female identity.
Its British writer-director Neil Marshall appeared at Lincoln Center's Film Comment Selects pre-release showing for a Q&A about his ?Deliverance goes underground.?
Much of the fun comes from seeing Marshall's clever little send ups to horror films of the past including Carrie, the Alien films, and even Deliverance.
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Directed by Daniel Myrick
influenced The Descent (2005)
Visuals Themes
This is also when the filmic allusions start piling up into their own sort of zombie brigade: scare quotes, if you like, from Don't Look Now, Carrie, Apocalypse Now, The Blair Witch Project, the Gollum sequences in The Lord of the Rings, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original Alien, and in one sudden flash-reveal of a whole brigade of crouching monsters, a direct lift from Aliens.
For more recent echoings, go to The Time Machine , Alien , First Blood, The Blair Witch Project , Pitch Black and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for starters.
They include explicit allusions (in addition to the movies already mentioned above) to " Picnic at Hanging Rock ," " Carrie ," “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ,” " The Third Man ," "The Fourth Man," " Don't Look Now ," " The Blair Witch Project " " Vertigo ," " Apocalypse Now "... and plenty more.
The shocks occasionally stray into the derivative -- elements of The Blair Witch Project hang uncomfortably in the air, and a few clichés mar the proceedings every now and then -- but they never run out of steam, and you rarely see them coming before they hit you full in the face.
Only two films in the past few years accomplished this feat: The Blair Witch Project and Gore Verbinski's remake of the Japanese horror film, The Ring.
Marshall is also an astute 'borrower' of other films, from the piton clipping suspense of "Cliffhanger," to the video camera revelations of "The Blair Witch Project" to a combined "Carrie"/"Apocalypse Now" moment that wows with its audacity.
This is also when the filmic allusions start piling up into their own sort of zombie brigade: scare quotes, if you like, from Don't Look Now, Carrie, Apocalypse Now, The Blair Witch Project, the Gollum sequences in The Lord of the Rings, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original Alien, and in one sudden flash-reveal of a whole brigade of crouching monsters, a direct lift from Aliens.
Not since Aliens have the two genres fit so seamlessly, if on a much smaller scale here.
“The Descent” is one of the creepiest movies you’re going to see this year or any other, a suspenseful, claustrophobic horror flick that is like a hellish melding of “Aliens” with “ The Hills Have Eyes .”
With shades of Aliens� Ripley, freckled-faced blond Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), still grieving from a horrific personal tragedy, metamorphoses into an avenging killing machine.
Marshall’s latest effort, Centurion, fuses elements of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator with the Rambo series, telling the story of a Roman soldier dropped behind enemy lines and forced to survive with only his wits and superior fighting skills.
In what feels like Gladiator mixed with Conan and Lord of the Rings, Marshall takes us back to the year AD 117.
While Marshall’s screenplay, brought to life amidst the spectacular Scottish wilderness, may raise questions of historical veracity ( Marshall freely admits he used his imagination to fill in the gaps), Centurion, unlike the more conservative Gladiator, pulls no punches in its portrayal of battle.
Imagine a flick like Braveheart, 300, Gladiator, or King Arthur, only those films have just been stripped of all those boring scenes about kings and princes, peasants and slaves, taxes and trades, and all that jazz.
Comparisons with over-applauded Gladiator will surface, but less pretentious Centurion holds its own.
Without the scale (or the budget, a modest $10 million) of a "Gladiator," the filmmaker is betting on the relative novelty of the story.
Does Marshall intentionally herald this by evoking Kubrick's The Shining (1980) at the start of this section?
The trek into the wilderness to highlight their isolation, the discovery of the animal carcass to bring home the idea that these people of modernity are about to be reintroduced to their mortal animalism...every time-honoured and weather-beaten convention is paid proper obeisance by genre-loving Marshall, who has, in fact, name-checked Deliverance, Alien , and The Shining as prime inspirations/sources for this film, which is honest of him and mostly accurate.
Utilizing the strategy of gradual conflict building, it recalls the meditative nature of “Alien” while marrying it with the careful mental disintegration of “The Shining.”
The film just can't seem to decide whether it wants to embrace the schlockiness inherent its concept and turn into a period version of Neil Marshall's Dog Soldiers , or play it super straight, adding the horror of the monsters on top of the already horrific realities of war.
Like From Dusk Til Dawn or Dog Soldiers , Overlord continues to play it coy about its horror movie foundation in its first half.
Posing initially as a generic WWII grunts-on-a-mission saga, the film takes a hard phantasmagorical swerve toward something more akin to The Descent , with the underground cave swapped out for a bunker.
“The Descent” told a cave exploring yarn long before the sightless monsters entered the frame.
The uncensored visuals seem to accidentally be great at times, but it isn’t enough to allow this version of Hellboy to replace what Guillermo del Toro accomplished with two films and Ron Perlman in the same role.
The Hellboy comic book inspired two features last decade, directed by Guillermo Del Toro and starring Ron Perlman.
While I would much rather have seen Ron Perlman reprise the character he played so well in Guillermo del Toro’s 2004 and 2008 “Hellboy” films, Harbour’s body-type and everyman bearing seemed perfect for the unconventional, demon spawn, superhero.
Neil Marshall’s Hellboy has faced immeasurable apprehension since satanic conception, as Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman’s defenders voiced outrage upon hearing Lionsgate’s decision to reboot Big Red anew versus honoring continuation after Hellboy II: The Golden Army .
Let me state right up front that I’m just as disappointed as the rest of you that Guillermo del Toro never got to finish off his Hellboy trilogy.
The film dabbles along an almost identical narrative to the 2004 version – Hellboy being inspired by evil to embrace his ‘destiny’ by unleashing Hell on Earth – but that’s where any similarities stop.
Of course, if you put it up against Open Water (2003), Cabin Fever (2002), High Tension (2003) and Wolf Creek (2005) this becomes a work of pure genius.
The first half of this late-summer Lionsgate release follows the company�s 2004 psychological thriller Open Water.
Fans of Saw and The Cave will likely find it more gripping than those movies, but it doesn't match the subtle horrors of 2003's Open Water.
Hellboy goes even more overboard than Logan in adding naughty bits just for the, uh, hell of it — unlike, say, Deadpool , which did a great job of making its R rating feel like a natural fit, these other pictures bring to mind the adage, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
It’s not that an R-rated superhero film is an impossible task; we’ve seen it multiple times before in the Marvel X-Men franchise, such as both Deadpool films and in the conclusion to the Wolverine saga, Logan .
There’s another popular superhero movie that we can point as influencing this new Hellboy and that’s Deadpool.
It’s most distinctive change from its forbearers is its shift in tone, taking a more lackadaisical, Deadpool -inspired approach, stuffing the film full of constant one-liners and abandoning much of the pathos and subtext del Toro brought to the material.
Whilst there’s certainly no harm in retreading the expected, or embracing a higher rating for that matter ( Deadpool , anyone?), this particular Hellboy is so void of a personality that it simply fails on the most basic level of being fun.
But where del Toro reverently reimagined the cartoonist’s beautifully clean-lined monster art, the example of risqué superhero hits such as Deadpool has let Marshall off the leash.