Dog Soldiers (2002)

After The Descent, director Neil Marshall earned a gold star from me for deft horror filmmaking. Unfortunately, his directorial debut is a tragic flop, the exact opposite of the sophomore slump - the filmic equivalent, I suppose, of the dreaded "freshman fifteen."

Kevin McKidd (of Rome and Grey's Anatomy fame) leads a cast of unknowns in this limp horror flick. Not much happens in the movie: an army platoon meets werewolves. Violence ensues.

I've been singing Marshall's praises ever since having the pants scared off of me by The Descent, but I'm going to have to reevaluate my perception of Marshall's canon. Dog Soldiers is, plain and simple, a mess that goes on too long without much ever happening. While I can appreciate a film that takes its time and is methodical about suspense, Dog Soldiers is painfully slow; the werewolves don't show up - indeed, aren't even mentioned - for about half an hour (excepting a brief and unsurprising precredits scene), leaving us with a cast of armymen who are neither very distinctive nor very interesting. Their crudeness is a poor substitute for character development, and the only reason we have to root for them is the fact that the lead soldier refused to kill a dog earlier. While The Descent had a similarly paced opening, those characters were more appearling and had personalities.

As for the werewolves, they're laughable. While I was expecting a bit of ingenuity in their presentation, it turns out that their bark was much worse than their bite. I liked the black-and-white POV shots that let us know where the werewolves are headed, but when the werewolves actually show up on screen, they're something much less than terrifying. In fact, they're absurd, quite obviously men in costumes with little mobility beyond slowly turning heads. They look more like claymation dogs than anything else, and it's difficult to be afraid of them when they shuffle like Betty White with overgrown fingernails.

And it's entirely predictable, breaking absolutely no new ground in a genre that so desperately needs creativity to do more than merely subsist. Horror films need to be innovative these days, particularly because I know I'm not alone in having outgrown the mindless slasher subgenre. Horror films can either refuse to take themselves seriously - Sam Raimi does a dynamite job doing that - or become extremely serious pieces with high production value, as The Descent did. Dog Soldiers does neither. It's entirely generic, predictable, and grounded by character types that we've all seen before. In a way, the ending is stolen wholesale from Tarantino's From Dusk Till Dawn, which is disappointing considering how well the earlier movie pulled off its climax.

I went into Dog Soldiers expecting chills and thrills, but what I got was gore and little more.


Dog Soldiers is rated R "for strong violence/gore and language." There's considerable bloody violence at play here, replete with werewolf ravaging and disemboweling, as well as a few instance of the F-bomb.

The Descent (2005)

I'll say this for British horror film The Descent - it works. Director Neil Marshall's second film preys on claustrophobia (fear of tight spaces), nyctophobia (fear of the dark), and scopophilia (a form of voyeuristic pleasure).

Unfortunately, that's about it.

If I had to sum up The Descent in five easy words, it'd go something like this: mutant cavedwellers attack sexy spelunkers. More specifically, the film follows six thrill-seeking women who decide to explore an undiscovered cave a year after one of them, Sarah, loses her husband and daughter in a horrific car crash (the first great jump moment of the movie). After they realize the cave is more difficult to navigate than they anticipated, the women also realize that they are not alone...

If this sounds like the plot of every horror movie ever, it's because The Descent unfortunately suffers from being overly formulaic. In classic form, the first act of the film introduces the characters to us, yet the real action doesn't start until they enter the cave. A few combat scenes and deaths later, the film closes with the "one last scare" that Wes Craven's Scream so strikingly highlighted - and parodied.

The performances all fall into the same tropes that horror films encourage - the blonde protagonist, her spunky best friend, the older sister protecting her rebellious younger sister, &c. And the monsters are mind-numbingly mindless, not even that terrifying to behold.

Why, then, does the film work?

A lot of it has to do with Marshall's deft direction and perverse mastery of basic human fears. Perhaps the tropes of moviedom help Marshall here; we can just feel when a jump moment is coming, yet the anticipation almost makes the event worse. Take for example the scene where sisters Sam and Rebecca are fleeing the creatures and come to an abrupt turn in the caverns - the direction is such that we can only see one of the two corridors at a time. The camera rounds the corner, swings back, back again, back again, so that by the time a creature lunges at the sisters, it's been built up in our heads so much that the jump is amplified tenfold.

Something must be said, too, for the film's setting - a dark and unfamiliar underground network of caves. The characters are out of their element, as are the viewers. Marshall successfully instills a claustrophobia with his visuals that most directors can only dream of. And of course the shaky camerawork during fights with the creatures take the style of Greengrass's Bourne trilogy to a bloody new high.

Would I have liked the film if I hadn't watched it at midnight, with all the lights off (even the streetlights)? Probably not. But if you're looking to have the bejeepers scared out of you, I can't think of a better flick than The Descent.