The Descent

Hooray for women! The Descent is not a movie to be missed. It's got cave dwelling crawlers (i.e., humans evolved to live deep underground), girls kicking ass, one spectacular Carrie meets Laura Croft: Tomb Raider moment. It's awesome and had us (i.e., me, Jen, and everyone else in the theatre) screaming in our seats. Word about this movie must be getting out as we noticed there were pockets of women in the theatre. And now it's time for another installment of helpful tidbits I gleaned from a scary movie...

The Descent Lessons Learned

1. When spelunking, don't tell your friends you're exploring a well-known cave and have a map as a guide when you're actually spelunking in an unknown cave filled with human-killing crawlers and you've left the map in the glove compartment of the car.

2. Split the rope amongst all members of the group so that when one person gets stuck in a particularly narrow section of the cave and panics when the cave begins collapsing, the person isn't so involved with getting unstuck they leave behind all of the rope, thereby screwing the rest of you when you need rope to escape the crawlers later on.

3. Make sure one of the members of your party is almost a doctor or an actual doctor. This comes in handy when you've got severe rope burns on your hand, bones protruding through skin, and need quick evaluations of a new species of subhumans (i.e., crawlers) to find weaknesses you can exploit to survive.

4. Do not sneak up on a fellow spelunker who is wielding an axe and has just killed two crawlers in self defense. She might mistake you for one of them and that would be bad for you. Very, very bad.

5. When you learn crawlers hunt by sound shut the fuck up, and for God's sake ditch the punk ass ugly watch your boyfriend gave you that sounds an alarm and alerts the crawlers to your hiding place.

6. Human-killing crawlers are anatomically correct so keep this in mind when combating the males of the species. (This is also known as the 'kick them in the balls' lesson.)

7. Bone up on how to kill a suffering human as you might be asked to perform this by friends who are too badly injured to survive the crawler hellhole you've stuck them in.

8. A blood bath can do wonders for knocking the sanity right out of your head, and once that is gone your chances for survival increase dramatically - even crawlers don't like dealing with crazy people.

9. If you don't see a crawler in front of your or beside you, be prepared for one to spring on you from above.