|
Neil Marshall (Britain, 1970) debuted with
the horror film Dog Soldiers (2002), which is a combination of werewolf
stereotypes, zombie stereotypes and war-movie stereotypes.
The plot is full of implausible turns (notably the two werewolves who infiltrate
the group wait until the end to try and kill them when they could have done it
right away), so the suspense requires that the viewer suspends all rational thinking.
We film opens with the gruesome murder of a couple camping in remote woods.
We don't see the killers.
Earlier, a soldier, Cooper, was tested by
Ryan, the head of a special forces unit, and almost passed the test except that
he refused to kill a dog, for which Ryan rejected him.
A month later, a group of soldiers including Cooper are involved in a training exercise in the same remote woods. They are armed only with blank ammunitions.
Looking at the map, they realize that there is a gap in the defenses of the
(fake) enemies and decide to head for that gap. One night, a slaughtered cow
plunges from a cliff onto their campfire. The following day the soldiers try
to retrace the steps of the cow to find out what happened to it.
They stumble onto a military camp that has been devastated: the soldiers have
been dismembered. Suddenly a wounded survivor pops up: it's captain Ryan.
As they retreat with Ryan, the soldiers are chased by unseen monsters.
One is killed, another one, the sergeant, is badly wounded. Cooper risks his
life to protect first Ryan and then the sergeant. The soldiers manage to reach
a road just when a car is passing by. The car is driven by a lady,
Megan, who picks them up just in time before the beasts attack. She drives
them to an isolated farmhouse. Nobody is home. The soldiers barricade themselves
into the house. Megan introduces herself as a zoologist. Ryan refuses to say
anything about his team and his mission. Megan and Cooper stitch up the sergeant's wound. It's a full-moon night. Megan reveals that the attackers are werewolves
and that she came to that forest to study them. Ryan still refuses to say anything but it's obvious that he's hiding something.
The werewolves attack. They have to blow up Megan's car to send them back.
The soldiers have limited ammunitions. They try to escape using the car of the
owners of the house, who are still missing, but that fails too.
Meanwhile, more soldiers are killed. Cooper discovers that Ryan's wounds have
miraculously healed. Finally, Ryan confesses: this was not a training exercise
but a mission engineered by Ryan to capture a werewolf using the soldiers as
bait to trap the beast. The map was deliberately designed to send the soldiers
into werewolf territory.
Ryan himself turns into a werewolf under their eyes and flees to join the pack.
The surviving soldiers understand that the inhabitants
of the farmhouse are the werewolves: that's why they are nowhere to be found.
Megan convinces the soldiers that the werewolves are hiding in the barn and
the soldiers blow up the barn, but Megan apologizes to Cooper: she is in
cahoots with the werewolves, there are no werewolves in the barn, and that
explosion has simply opened a way for the beasts to attack.
She too turns into a werewolf. The werewolves attack and kill more soldiers,
and the soldiers kill some werewolves. The sergeant himself realizes that he is
turning into a werewolf: his mortal wounds are magically healing. He decides
to blow up the house, including himself, to kill the attacking werewolves.
There is one soldier alive: Cooper. And there is one werewolf alive: Ryan.
Cooper manages to kill Ryan using a
a silver papercutter (that was seen in the first scene, a gift from the girl to the boyfriend before they were killed).
Cooper is the only survivor as the sun rises.
Marshall perfect his horror skills in
The Descent (2005). The film
packs plenty of suspense although it is a little frustrating that
the camera often doesn't let us see clearly the objects and the faces in the dark.
There is already a lot of suspense before the monsters appear.
Sarah, Juno and Beth end a whitewater rafting adventure. Sarah's husband Paul and their little daughter are waiting for her. When they part from the other girls, we see that Juno stares at Paul with a sad look on her face.
Paul is lost in his thought while driving back home and crashes against another car, killing himself and the little girl. Sarah survives.
One year later, Juno organizes a cave expedition with Sarah, Beth and three other young women: Sam, Rebecca and Holly.
Sarah is still easily hurt by references to men or children.
The six ladies drive to a remote location, park the cars and hike to the cave entrance, which is just a giant hole.
They proceed inside the cave trusting that Juno knows the way out but it soon appears that it is not easy.
To make matters worse, a tunnel collapses behind them, almost killing Sarah
and blocking the way back to the same entrance. Juno confesses that
she tricked them: instead of a popular cave, Juno decided to explore an unexplored cave for which there is no map. And there is no hope of being rescued because
they applied for a permit to explore the popular cave, which means that nobody knows they are in this one. Their only option is to continue deep inside the cave. Unfortunately the route gets more and more difficult and acrobatic moves are required to cross giant gaps and climb vertical chimneys.
They think that nobody has been there before but then they find climbing equipment and cave paintings.
Holly falls into a hole and breaks a leg. They improvise a split and start
carrying her.
Sarah is convinced that she saw a man in the cave, but Juno scolds her.
Sarah is soon vindicated because a strange creature soon attacks them.
The screeching creature captures, kills and devours Holly.
The ladies now realize that the cave is littered with animal bones.
Monsters keep appearing from everywhere and attacking the ladies.
Juno is the first one to find a way to kill them with her axe, but she
is separated from the others. Thinking that she is being attacked from
behind, Juno turns and stabs... Beth. As Beth seems to be dying, the terrified
Juno leaves her behind.
Juno realizes that someone ventured into the cave from the other direction and left markings on the walls, so there is a way out, but she has to kill one
monster after the other while she's trying to find the others.
Finally, she finds Sam and Rebecca but refuses to leave without Sarah.
Sam realizes that the monsters are blind and only hunt by sound.
They evolved in the darkness of the caves just like bats.
Sarah, wandering alone, stumbles on the agonizing Beth, who is still alive
and whispers that Juno stabbed her and that Juno had an affair with Sarah's
husband. Beth then begs Sarah to kill her so she won't be eaten alive by the
monsters, which Sarah does.
Juno is desperately looking for Sarah, unaware that now Sarah hates her.
We guess that the very car accident happened because Sarah's husband was
thinking of Juno while driving home.
Sarah is now a killer and begins killing monsters.
Sam and Rebecca are killed and Juno remains alone.
Juno and Sarah finally runs into each other and fight the monsters together while moving towards the exit, but Sarah's look tells Juno that Sarah has changed.
When they seem to be near the exit, Sarah confronts Juno and stabs her with her axe, leaving her to be devoured by monsters.
Sarah flees but falls
falls into a hole and remains unconscious until... daylight wakes her up.
She can see the exit and crawls up towards it. She is out in minutes and
realizes she is near the cars. She gets into a car and, covered in blood,
drives away as fast as she can. She then stops to throw up. When she looks back
into the car, Juno is sitting in the passenger's seat next to her...
Note: the original ending is that Sarah wakes up in the cave alone (without ever regrouping with Juno) while the monsters are closing in on her. The US version of the film is a sort of happy ending because Sarah survives, but ends with the ghost of Juno in the car.
Unfortunately, later in his career, Marshall wasted his talent with
the mediocre sci-fi movie Doomsday (2008),
the historical Centurion (2010),
the superhero movie Hellboy (2019),
the horror movie The Reckoning (2020),
The Lair (2022) and
Duchess (2024).
(Copyright © 2024 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
|
