Smeagol's Revenge

Well-made horror movies are among my favorite types of films. The key here, though, is WELL-MADE horror movies, which are rare and few. After seeing early reviews of "The Descent," I was pretty excited, but I didn't want to get my hopes up. "The most effective horror movie since 'Alien'"? Come on! "Alien" is a masterwork after all.
However I was NOT disappointed. "The Descent" was scary as hell, but also a really good movie with great characters and genuine nail-biting suspense. At the moment I can only think of two other horror movies that have scared me as much, while still being extremely well-made and developed..."Alien" of course, will always be #1, but "The Descent" was at least on par with the original "Halloween."
To be honest, I thought the movie lost a little bit of steam once the monsters finally showed up, since up to that point we were on the edge of our seat waiting for them. However that's not saying much, since those early scenes were some of the most tense I've ever witnessed. I also thought that the scenes with the monsters relied a tad too much on gore in a few cases than was needed (such as poking the monster's eyes out multiple times), but even so, my thumbs are WAY up on this one, and I am not planning on going spelunking anytime soon.
However one thing I would like to mention are my thought on the ending (spoilers...ding! ding! ding!). Often with movies like this you can conquer any nervous fears you have by thinking, "Well, it's just a movie...I don't live in a cave so I don't have to worry," but in this case the movie ends with the terrifying scare of Juno showing up as a corpse in the carseat next to the main heroine Sarah. This had me glancing over to my OWN carseat all the way home. The dumb interpretation of this ending is "Oooo...Juno's ghost" which is, quite frankly, LAAAAME. The more popular, and probably correct, interpretation is that Sarah never made it out of the cave alive, and now instead of nightmares of her daughter she has nightmares of her friend she murdered (note how Sarah bonks her head on the rocks right before she sees the exit to the cave and manages to escape). The UK ending, which I just watched online, states this pretty explicitly, although I didn't like it as much as the US one. However MY interpretation is that even IF Sarah made it out of the cave alive, she will now be haunted instead by recurring nightmares of Juno, and not her daughter. Her journey through the caves with the monsters may have caused her to get over her horrible accident from years ago, but now she has a new, and even worse, accident to plague her conscience. My interpretation probably isn't the correct one, but I like it more...so there!
And lastly...can I say that the girl who played Juno is pretty freakin' hot?