LostintheDarknessofNight Reviews

In Fear (I) (2013)

Excellent Score Only Saving Grace in Otherwise Formulaic Genre Fare

[4/10 · 10 March 2014]

Bored and looking for something to watch, I was browsing through lists of the best horror movies of 2013. The more and more "In Fear" appeared in them, the more my interest was piqued.

Well let's just say the anticipation of watching it was much more exciting than the actual process of watching it. All we have with "In Fear" is a poorly scripted, annoyingly repetitive horror movie that is carried along by a phenomenal score that is way better than it has any right to be. The sounds mesh with the images so well that there were moments that I still felt nervous, even though I knew what was going to happen, courtesy of the by-the-numbers script.

Tom and Lucy are two people that just met two weeks prior. On their way to a music festival in a nearby town, Tom decides to surprise Lucy by taking her to a hotel for a night...a rather questionable move for people that have just met. Thankfully, Lucy seems to be fine with it.

But there are some red flags from the outset: For one, the only way to get to the hotel is to follow a truck, whose owner they never see. Even more alarming? He points to a locked gate, insinuating that is where they should go next, before suddenly leaving them alone. I don't know about you, but that would be enough for me to get the hell out of there and never return, but Tom and Lucy, stupid horror characters that they are, do as they're instructed.

From here, we get thirty minutes of them driving around in circles, inexplicably continuing to follow the same signs to the motel even after learning it only takes them back to where they started. Somehow, these scenes manage to be creepy, at least at first, if for no other reason than the aforementioned score. Of course, once minute twenty rolls around of the same old thing, it starts to lose its luster. Then once Max arrives, things go from bad to worse, both for the characters, and for the viewer, leading to an abomination of an ending.

"In Fear" is certainly a competent example of independent filmmaking, at least from a visual standpoint, and I guess it deserves some points for that. It's well shot, well acted, well lit, and despite a few confusing cuts, pretty well edited. Unfortunately, the one thing it's missing, besides a shred of believability, is a halfway decent script. These characters are ones you've seen in dozens, if not hundreds, of horror movies before, in that they are clearly only reacting to the needs of the script; they do not act like normal people attempting to get out of a desperate situation, but rather. Put any real person in this situation, and it would be a five minute movie with no scares and no real action.

Come to think of it, I've essentially summed up "In Fear", only it somehow needs 85 minutes to do that.

The Descent (2005)

A masterpiece in modern horror

[9/10 · 5 August 2006]

"The Descent" is obviously not an American movie. It's got imagination, smarts, and, dare I say it, actual SCARES. Everything the American horror film lacks. The latter is one reason I've stopped watching movies, period. Once a video store clerk licking his chops to see every new release that came in, and every horror movie we carried, I quickly grew bored of watching the same movie over and over again, in which all the characters that should live somehow manage to do so, and vice versa for all the characters that should die.

"The Desscent" is a film in which none of the characters SHOULD die. It also brilliantly nixes the ol' "love tension" cliché that kills so many movies. How so? By filling the entire cast with females. Strong females. These aren't the typical all-they-do-is-scream-and-die women from American horror movies. These are women who fill their free time with white-water rafting, mountain climbing, and anything else that can give them a rush of adrenaline.

To quickly sum up the plot, we follow a group of seven women lead by Juno, a women with perhaps more of a thirst for the extreme than all the others. The women all plan to explore a "level 2" cave, which is a cave of roughly "average" difficulty. Or as one character puts it, "a tourist attraction." But Juno has other things in mind. Before you know it, the characters are exploring an unnamed, unexplored cave that may or may not even have a way out.

That's just a rough summary of the plot. If you want more, you can read virtually every other review on this film. But what I want to focus on are the scares. Oh God are there scares. I am not a person easily fazed by horror films, basically for the reason above (that all of them follow simple formulas that, once known, give away the entire movie). "The Descent" follows very few formulas. Since all the characters are strong, you really have no idea which ones will die, and which ones will live. You can't easily guess where scares will pop up. There's one brilliant scene (don't worry, I won't give it away) where you KNOW for a fact something's coming, and you think you know exactly when, and you're wrong. So you start to relax. Then it finally comes, jerking you out of your seat and sending your heart-rate through the roof.

"The Descent" is a brilliant film, though not without flaws. Though I realize the darkness is for atmosphere's sake (and it works for the most part), there are a few times when it becomes difficult to tell who's who, once the females separate, simply because you can't see their face. It's also tough to tell what's going on during the "struggle" sequences between the characters and the creatures, which leads me to another complaint: The creatures look like Golem extras from "The Lord of the Rings". They are creepy-looking, but the one way the movie could have been even better...well nearly perfect, is if the creatures were never shown in whole.

As it stands, however, "The Descent" is a modern masterpiece in horror, a film that would theoretically make that perfect first date movie--except there's the good chance that the boy, who's seen every horror movie and, like me, has figured out the formulas, might also be clinging to the girl by the end.