The whole Cave/Descent thing had me confused. I read a synopsis of both movies and assumed they were just the same movie, but with regionalised names.
WRONG.
The Cave looks cheap and ****ty, going by the trailers. The Descent is ****ing awesome.
Aside from the fact that I was actually less scared once the monster showed up, and the somewhat disatisfying ending, it's a ****ing brilliant movie.
The whole pipes-through-the-window bit scared the living **** out of me. And this is before they've even gotten to the cave.
As for the monsters: Yes, they're pussies. Yes, a 6-man team with some of those ice-axes would've butchered their way through legions of them. But they're not supposed to be monster-monsters. They're supposed to be quasi-real animals. Actually, they're pretty much Morlocks. Especially since the cave-paintings bit could be thought of as suggesting they'd once been humans who lived in the caves.
And while the ending is kinda.....weak, really - I suppose it works. It closes the plot-hole of "lets follow the markings left by the last group of people never to escape this place" nicely.
And while I'm on the subject of the plot: How ****ing stupid are they? They find loads of old climbing gear and a helmet (who leaves a ****ing helmet behind? No-one, that's who) abandonned in the uncharted cave, they find cave-paintings which clearly goddamn show that SOMEONE lives/lived down there, then when one woman says she saw a man scurrying around they don't ****ing believe her. Right then I decided I wanted them all to be eaten.
And how come the 100-years-ago team never made it out, huh? Why not just turn arou.......Hmm. AHAHAHAHAAH! I just got it. The cave-painting showed 2 exits, right? If the old team had used the entrance the women used, they coulda just walked back out - but they didn't, so they must've come in the other way. And we know they never just turned around and left, so their entrance/exit must've collapsed, blocking their exit. Then they made their way towards the entrance/exit the women used and probably couldn't climb out because of the sheer drop, or got eaten. So the women were ****ed as soon as their way in collapsed, it being the only way in or out of the caves open till that point.
This, of course, also means that the monsters are now trapped and will starve to death.
I'd've still much prefered something along the lines of only one of them getting out alive and never saying anything about it to anyone. Then the film skips ahead a few years and shows her leading a group of squaddies on a weekend cave-diving adventure, carrying a backpack full of knives, guns, lights and explosives.