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UK/Germany/France/USA: Paul W.S. Anderson, 2002

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USA: Mark Romanek, 2002

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USA: John Lasseter, 1998

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UK: Neil Marshall, 2005

Back in January, I picked up a copy of Neil Marshall's The Descent, which promptly ended up on my DVD shelf and has languished there ever since. Until this morning, that is, when I dug it out, popped it in, and found myself enjoying an extremely tight, beautifully shot horror movie that makes his previous film, the rather unexceptional Dog Soldiers, look like a turd.

The plot's a straightforward one. A group of seven women decide to go and explore some caves. One of the group, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald, who it took me some time to realise was the blonde office assistant in Spooks), lost her husband and child a year ago in a car accident, and is quite clearly still shaken by the events. So, when these intrepid ladies find themselves lost in an unexplored cave without a map, all hell breaks loose, as you can probably imagine. And things get even worse when they realise that the caves are not quite as deserted as one would think...

There's nothing particularly profound about The Descent's plot, and I seriously doubt that it took Marshall a particularly long time to come up with it. What is extremely impressive, though, is the execution. For a film that spends so much time in near-darkness, it's astoundingly nice to look at, and the film takes its time establishing its characters so that, by the time they end up trapped underground, we've invested enough in them to care about what happens to them. These characters are far from perfect - in fact, a couple of them are downright annoying - but they seem human, and the film is all the better for this. And the tension is handled brilliantly. Even at the start, when nothing much seems to be going on, the whole atmosphere seems tense, and once the action kicks off, it never lets up.

I really enjoyed The Descent, and give it a high recommendation. Proof, it seems, that the UK can occasionally produce a worthwhile film.

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USA: John Boorman, 1977

So, Exorcist II: The Heretic - an unmitigated disaster or a misunderstood work of genius? Having watched it in the early hours of this morning, my gut instinct is that it is neither. Yes, at least to some extent it is indeed laughably bad, but at the same time part of me bought into it much more easily than the original Exorcist. Boorman apparently hated the original, so quite why he agreed to this gig is anyone's guess, but you certainly can't accuse him of playing it safe, since although a number of key cast members return, and it builds on the story of its predecessor, the two really have little in common.

Whereas the original listed several men of the cloth as consultants, Exorcist II has none, and that shows in its considerably less "by the book" attitude towards religious mythology. Here, we get flying locust demons, weird science that would have made Dario Argento proud, telepathic journeys into the African desert and all sorts of thematic elements that simply don't make any sense at all. Where does the telepathic connection between Father Lamont and Regan come from? And, more to the point, why is everyone so worried about Regan's apparent "powers", when all she actually does is predict a fire in a psychiatric hospital and save a whole load of children from death?

So, script-wise at least, it's a total mess. But at the same time I still enjoyed it on some level. The hallucinations and flashbacks are suitably eerie (especially the first one, which superimposes both the possessed and non-possessed Regan in the same shot and does various other nifty overlay tricks), and I loved the constant use of wide open spaces and glass walls. I've no idea what any of it meant, but then I'm not convinced that this film was meant to make any sense in the first place. Quite honestly I don't know what to make of it all, but at least it's not the complete disgrace some people have claimed.

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