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I watched this movie with Jen the other night, it was the second time I'd seen it and the first time for my wife to be, but I'd forgotten how good it was. It was directed by Neil Marshall, the man responsible for the excellent "Dog Soldiers", and represents an unashamed return to balls-to-the-wall, pulls out all the stops, horror.

The title has a double meaning, as most movie titles do, the descent referring to the six friends' situation as potholers, and the descent into madness. A brief synopsis of the plot shows our female lead, Sarah, lose her husband and daughter in a pre credits scene ( a simple but brilliantly realised set piece that shows you don't need to see a car flip over countless times for it to be exciting). Fast forward a year later and she meets up with her friends once again to go down a pothole. However, not far into the excursion there's a cave-in but, not to worry, there are three entrances to this cave. Not so because the woman who led them there, Juno (Nathalie Mendoza from "Hotel Babylon") has led them down an unexplored cavern as part of an ego-trip.

Now the film is pretty terrifying before any subterranean monsters show up. Marshall makes full use of the dark and inescapable surroundings meaning that I was already scared before one of the "Crawlers" showed up and the gory fun begins, and I do mean gory. There's no let up in the blood stakes for the final half an hour, eyes are gouged out, heads pick-axed, guts ripped out, throats slit, necks plunged. It is extremely graphic which is something of a throwback. Even recent, tough to watch chillers such as "Wolf Creek", "Saw" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" don't have as much on-screen gore as their 80's counterparts. This one has it in spades.

I've already mentioned the descent into madness. There is a theory that the "Crawlers" don't exist and are, in fact, a figment of Sarah's growing psychosis. The reasons are several. Even before she gets out of the hospital in the opening scene we witness an hallucination, through which two of her friends emerge. Fast forward to the shack where she stays with her friends a year later and the hallucinations continue, the camera lingers on a bottle of pills quite deliberately. As they walk towards the gaping chasm, one of the girls mentions a side-effect of potholing that says lengthy exposure to the dark can bring about hallucinations. This would go some way to explaining the fact that, initially, Sarah is the only one that sees and hears the "Crawlers". She would have left behind the pills, thinking she'd be back before needing another dose, but the time down below, combined with the potential for hallucination, brings about the psychosis. It would also explain the near-hour long running time before the first "Crawler" attack (initially seen through a camcorder). This theory falls flat when some "Crawler" scenes don't include Sarah, but could this be Sarah herself comitting the acts and imagining them in another way? We are being asked to follow her story after all.

Juno is the villain of the group. It's implied that she slept with her husband and was partly responsible for the vacant actions that led to the crash that killed him. Sarah attacks her and leaves her for dead after learning she killed her best friend in the cave (accidentally), could this also be her way of rationalising the murder of Juno who, though responsible for their predicament, hardly commits a crime punishable by death? It's an interesting idea that requires a third watch at some point, once my nerves have returned after the second viewing.

The end is also contentious. Sarah, having awoken from another hallucination that suggests she had escaped, sees her daughter in front of a birthday cake. This is a recurring image although something is different on this occasion. Unlike the other three or four times, the cake has 6 candles instead of 5. Now this could represent her birthday, the first such hallucination is just after the accident and could simply haver referred to her daughter's age ( a year on there would, of course, be 6 candles). It could also refer to the number who have been killed, in which case Sarah is also already dead, reunited with her daughter. The American version doesn't have this final image, ending when a "Crawler" attacks her in the car. Perhaps that was not the hallucination and the "Crawler" had, in fact, killed her in the car after she'd escaped leading to the beyond the grave hallucination.

Whatever the true meaning, the movie did what it set out to do, it scared me. Jen's first reaction when it ended was "that was a horrible film", no doubt the director would have been pleased with that response. It made us both jump several times (Jen screamed at least twice), isn't that what horror films are supposed to do.