Chicks With Picks
The Descent was just great, and you should see it as soon as possible.
It’s a proper schlock-horror genre movie, and all the better for it. A group of female friends, with various hidden grudges and issues, go exploring an uncharted cave. You can write the rest of the plot for yourself. There’s none of the campy humour that there was in Dog Soldiers (Neil Marshall’s previous film) or the self-knowing playalong of New Nightmare or Scream. It was just straight-ahead slash-em-up type stuff, baddies skulking in the dark, terrible special effects, and irritating main characters, all of which are prerequisites. (About the characters though, they might have taken the ‘irritating’ factor too far. People were cheering whenever Loud Oirish Girl got hurt.)
Good stuff. I wholeheartedly approve of anyone making proper old-fashioned horror flicks.
A note about the cinema. I went to the Peckham Multiplex and ended up wanting to like it a lot more than I did. It’s really cheap. £3.50 for any ticket at any time (compare and contrast to Vue who wanted £12 for the same film,) and it’s an independent cinema. The problems were that the seats are more or less flat, so you have to sit right at the front to get a clear view, and the other people in the cinema were idiots. At least in the West End, people realise that it’s not ok to talk through the whole movie and scream at the top of your lungs whenever something scary happens on-screen. Quite a few people left in the middle (loudly) because it was all too much for them.
In terms of cheap cinemas in London, the Prince Charles is pretty cool as well. They show lots of interesting stuff, but can’t have all that many showings, which means I’m only rarely around at the right time to see anything there.