After making his directorial debut in 2002 with the entertaining Dog Soldiers, Neil Marshall followed it up with the 2005 horror The Descent.

Dog Soldiers is a comedy / horror about some British soldiers who are out on a training exercise and run into some werewolves. Think Aliens but with werewolves and a lot of humour. The Descent is all horror and no humour.

The movie follows a group of women as they go spelunking in an uncharted cave. One of the women played by Shauna Macdonald had lost her husband and daughter in a car accident the year before and her friends want her to have a good time. The group quickly gets lost and are desperate to find a way out. That’s when they discover that there is something living in the caves.

The film is extremely claustrophobic. The cave gets very narrow in spots and Marshall uses the closeness to his advantage. I have a friend who gets claustrophobic and he just couldn’t sit through scenes in this movie. When the film came to the United States, they naturally tampered with the film and cut the ending for some bizarre reason. If you are watching this movie, watch the original British cut. It’s better and it’s the way Neil Marshall wanted it.