Women In Horror Month: Is That Your Final Answer?

What do you know, but it's already a week into February. Where does the time go?

I don't know whose job it is to decide these things but we are officially celebrating Women in Horror Month, and I would be loathe to ignore my calling. Throughout the month I will have several features celebrating women and their contributions to the horror genre, but first the obvious.

Because I'm me, I'd like to open with my

TOP TEN FINAL GIRLS

#10 Alice Johnson (A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child)

Played By: Lisa Wilcox

A character that manages to survive in my esteem even in spite of the entirely terrible and incoherent Part 5. Alice is essentially the Tommy Jarvis of the Nightmare franchise, a late-to-the-game player that defeats a horror icon multiple times - and lives to tell the tale. Where most Final Girls who have a return get their comeuppance, she sticks to her guns and makes Freddy her chew toy.

#9 Ginny Field (Friday the 13th Part 2)

Played By: Amy Steel

One of the smartest of Jason's victims, child psychologist Ginny Field manages to get inside his head and trick her way to survival. She's one of the only Final Girls to actually outwit the killer instead of wail on him with a machete for 20 minutes. Although she does get a few good whacks in during an especially memorable chainsaw sequence.

#8 Marybeth Dunston (Hatchet II)

Played By: Tamara Feldman, Danielle Harris

Although she was certainly a sideshow in the first Hatchet film, perennial 21st Century Final Girl Marybeth Dunston was given new life when genre veteran Danielle Harris stepped into the role. Having appeared in four Halloween movies (two of them as a child!), she was the perfect choice to sass up what needed to be a punchy role opposite King Jason himself, Kane Hodder.

#7 Jannicke (Cold Prey, Cold Prey 2)

Played By: Ingrid Bolsø Berdal

Sexy. Norwegian. Badass. Jannicke has seen more than her share of trouble, so she decided to make some of her own. Despite one terrifically dumb decision that extended the finale of the sequel for a good fifteen minutes, she is still one of the most consistently intelligent and entertaining slasher protagonists of them all.

#6 Sidney Prescott (Scream, Scream 2, Scream 3, Scream 4)

Played By: Neve Campbell

Darn but I do love myself a sarcastic heroine. Sidney hates horror movies for being a series of reductive and insulting clichés, so her worst nightmare comes true when she is trapped in one. She's still alive and kicking though, so hats off to seeing herself through four installments of a notorious director's franchise.

#5 Sarah (The Descent)

Played By: Shauna MacDonald

Savage womanhood at its finest. She's minding her own business, just trying to get over the death of her cheating husband and daughter when she is attacked by a horde of underground flesh-eating monsters. However, she quickly turns the tables and although her ending might not exactly be happy, it's absolutely fitting and resonant.

#4 Nancy Thompson (A Nightmare on Elm Street)

Played By: Heather Langenkamp

So good they brought her back. Twice. Decades apart. Nancy is everything a teen protagonist should be: lovable, smart, a little bit silly, and, most importantly, a teenager. Although Langenkamp's acting isn't exactly top drawer, it matches perfectly with the genre and keeps Nightmare going strong a good 30 years after its release.

#3 Laurie Strode (Halloween, Halloween II, Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later)

Played By: Jamie Lee Curtis

How could I not include her? She's not gonna be number one due to her unfortunate habit of dropping weapons right next to masked serial murderers, but she's one of the most persistent and incredible Final Girls due to Jamie Lee Curtis' unmatched slasher performance. She was so good they retconned her offscreen death from Part 4 to bring her back in a blaze of glory.

#2 Tina Shepard (Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood)

Played By: Lar Park-Lincoln

AKA Carrie. This telekinetic teen kicks some serious Voorhees butt. This is no small feat, especially considering that in this installment the masked galunk was played by Kane Hodder for the very first time. Definitely one of my favorite installments of the series, in large part due to Tina's incredible prowess at being awesome.

#1 Erin (You're Next)

Played By: Sharni Vinson

Who couldn't have predicted this one? The only Final Girl I've ever seen who is more proficient with an axe than her pursuers. Pitted against multiple foes, she easily outstrips any of her single-villain peers, all with a flawless Australian accent.
Word Count: 781

Underground Beef

Year: 2009
Director: Jon Harris
Cast: Shauna Macdonald, Michael J. Reynolds, Jessika Williams
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

The opening shot of The Descent Part 2 immediately retcons aspects of the original. This is perhaps the quickest a sequel has managed to show that it will be a step down from its predecessor.

It appears to be set after the inferior (and less bleak) US ending to The Descent as lone survivor Sarah Carter (Macdonald) is rescued after escaping a cave filled with brutal torment and the screams of her fallen sisters. Evidently Sarah has immediately forgotten the events of the past 24 hours and I sigh a sigh of surrender as I allow the movie to run as fast as it can from the arena of its terrifying ancestor, the music soaring in a manner oddly reminiscent of Les Misérables.

Evidently one of Sarah's obviously British friends was the senator's niece and a search party is being organized to find the missing spelunkers. Equipped with a brand new hyperbolically Scottish accent (that sounds exactly like the trailer for Pixar's Brave), Sarah is sent back down into the cave system with the rescuers in an attempt to jog her memory and help them find her friends.

Although this intro disappointingly ignores nearly every major plot point of The Descent, I am willing to let it be what it is. Unfortunately, its central concept seems to be "make things exactly the same, only worse."

This is a very close mirror of an iconic shot from the original, yet it lacks any sort of emotional resonance, terror, or well... anything. Consider this a metaphor for the entire film.

The team heads down into a dark mineshaft to find a makeshift entrance into the cave system. This is surprisingly easy, considering how hard it was to escape last time. No, I will not stop griping. Let me have this.

The characters this time around are much less fleshed-out and the penis ratio has risen considerably - from 0 to 50%. The members of the search team are mostly cyphers with qualities like "I'm a spelunker!", "I'm a terrible human being!", or "We're boning maybe!" The only character who has any sort of personality is Sarah (who pretty much immediately regresses to her savage state from the first film), and even she is mostly one note, with virtually all of her "character moments" relying on us remembering other, better moments from the original.

Basically my notes on this movie are mostly me complaining like an old man getting an insurance physical. I'll try to consolidate them into this one last paragraph of grumpiness. The caves are so brightly lit that it makes you wonder why it's so hard for them to find sunlight. The falling rocks are clearly made of foam. There's some weird herky jerky Danny Boyle effect on the footage of the monsters and their make-up is much less convincing. There is more gore, but to less effect. A major gore shot is repeated on two different characters. Goodness knows why, because it wasn't very strong in the first place. They reuse the footage of the best scare in the original right before attempting a similar scare. The monsters are way too visible for way too much of the time. The theme of motherhood and the loss of a child is almost completely absent until the final scene - and even then it's more of a throwaway attempt to connect to anything from the superior film. People won't shut up, even when they know the monsters track them via sound. The ending is stupid. That's all I'm gonna say about that.

And that was the longest paragraph in my review.

I hear a noise! It sounds like a college student crying.

Really, The Descent Part 2 wasn't all bad. It was still a mostly effective scary movie. Unfortunately being attached to the Descent name, although it is profitable, invites unfavorable comparisons. This is one of those movies that I wish I had made - not because it's good, but because I feel that there is a gem of a movie hidden in here that the filmmakers just couldn't discover.

High point: Natalie Mendoza's character returns for some sexy monster stabbing shenanigans.

Why are you still alive? OK, nevermind, you look great.

TL;DR: The creators of The Descent Part 2 think The Descent is a fantastic movie... to poop on!

Rating: 5/10

Should I Spend Money On This DVD? No, but I will because I'm unstoppable.

Word Count: 760

Reviews In This Series

The Descent (Marshall, 2005)

The Descent Part 2 (Harris, 2009)

In the Dark, Nobody Can See You Scream

For our Scream 101 podcast episode about this film, click here.

Year: 2005
Director: Neil Marshall
Cast: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid
Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

I'm just gonna come right out and say it. The Descent was so terrifying that Henri and I had to watch all of The Truman Show to feel like normal humans again.

This UK film follows a group of thrill-seeking girls who decide to go spelunking in a cave in the mountains of Appalachia. There's Holly (Nora Jane Noone), the bold and experienced (and possibly lesbian? Maybe I just hoped she was) adrenaline junkie. There's Juno (Mendoza), a brash and tactless woman. And there's Sarah (Macdonald), who lost her husband and daughter in a tragic accident, and for whom this trip was orchestrated - in an attempt for her friends to reconnect with her.

Also there's Sam (MyAnna Buring), Beth (Reid), and Rebecca (Saskia Mulder) who share approximately .16 personality traits. One of them is Sarah's best friend and one of them is her sister. And one of them is a nurse, I think it's the sistery one. For the life of me, I could not keep track of them.  It's really not important because the film is less about developing character (for the non-leads at least) than it is about balls to the wall claustrophobic torment. It is a mainstay on many people's lists of "Best Horror of the Decade" and it is plainly obvious as to why.

The girls are nervous but excited when they drop into the depths of the cave, but things quickly start to go wrong. This is a horror movie, after all. After a cave-in separates them from the main cavern, the girls desperately seek an alternative exit as they delve deeper and deeper underground.

I think that one in the front is Beth. Or Becca. Or... screw it.

The movie is hard enough to watch as it is, with the girls crawling through tunnels scarcely wider than their skinny little bodies. Unfortunately, things go from bad to worse as it slowly dawns on the unlucky spelunkers that... They're Not Alone.

I won't give too much away except that the film starts losing it's sh!t at about the 50 minute mark and doesn't take a break. An early scene almost made me fall off the back of my bed, and at one point I even said "holy blap!" because I was too out of whack for real words.

Not only is it like a jackhammer to the spine, it is actually remarkably well composed. Very often, there are shots in which objects in the foreground are juxtaposed with objects in the background to shed meaning on both items in frame. Now, this isn't exactly a groundbreaking concept in film, but for a low budget horror picture, this is Citizen Kane level stuff we're talking about.

There is also a repeated motif about the loss of Sarah's child and it's hard to say more without giving things away, but suffice to say it does make you think, even if its primary goal is to electrify your nerve endings. The sets are stupendous, the darkness is oppressive, and the presence of an overarching theme is enough to launch the film into the upper stratosphere of 2000's horror.

The strength of the film lies in its all-female cast and their interactions shed light on the nature of women's friendships, the morality system of society at large, and just how much butt a single girl can kick. Regrettably, the girls do sometimes fall prey to Stupid Horror Movie Character-itis (for the love of God, stop shouting), but that can all be explained away by extreme claustrophobia, which as explained early on can cause panic attacks and... well, basically everything bad that has ever happened to anyone ever.

I am muzzled by my desire to have people go into this movie with no major preconceptions, but I will end this too short review by saying that I'm jumping on the bandwagon. I absolutely agree that this film is without a doubt one of the top ten of the 2000's, and almost definitely the best horror film of 2005.

TL;DR: In spite of a lack of major characterization for half the cast, The Descent has quite a large amount of artistic merit and will flay the skin from your bones.
Rating: 9/10
Should I Spend Money on This DVD? Yes, please.
Word Count: 735
Reviews In This Series
The Descent (Marshall, 2005)
The Descent Part 2 (Harris, 2009)