Natalie Mendoza Movies

Australian filmmaker Stavros Kazantzidis directs the dark comedy Horseplay. Con man Max Mackendrick (Marcus Graham) wants a bit of horseracing action, so he marries the snobby Alicia Coxhead (Tushka Bergen), the daughter of famous horceracer Barry Coxhead (Bill Hunter). However, Max gets eternally barred from the sport after he gets caught swapping horses. Undaunted, Max and his sex-addict sidekick Henry (Jason Donovan) come up with a plan to make a million dollars at the Melbourne Cup. He needs the money to get back at his nemesis Barry and to reunite with his needy ex-girlfriend Jade (Natalie Mendoza). He hires two crooks (Jacek Koman and Robert Menzies) for an elaborate kidnapping scheme that inevitably and quickly goes awry. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, Rovi

The Descent editor Jon Harris makes the leap to the director's chair in this sequel to Neil Marshall's claustrophobic 2005 creature flick. Sarah Carter (Shauna MacDonald) has managed to escape from the Appalachian cave system where all of her friends were killed by "crawlers" -- primordial humanoids who have adapted to living in the subterranean darkness. In hopes that some of the spelunkers may have survived, Sheriff Redmond Vaines rounds up his deputies for a rescue mission, and decides to take Sarah along as a guide. At first Sarah has no memory of the horrors that wait below, but the further the team pushes into the cave, the more vivid her flashbacks become until the reality of the situation sinks in. Now, the rescue crew is being hunted from the shadows by a whole new clan of crawlers that are even more vicious and terrifying than their predecessors. Sarah was lucky to make it out of the caves alive the first time -- will that luck carry over into her second descent, or is she doomed to die while dreaming of escaping into the sunlight? ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

A group of close female friends on a yearly adventure vacation find themselves trapped and hunted in a series of caves by an unknown force that lurks in the shadows in The Descent, the second horror feature from Dog Soldiers writer/director Neil Marshall. After suffering a devastating car crash one year before, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) is lured to the States with her friend Beth (Alex Reid) to a special spelunking trip by the fearless Juno (Natalie Mendoza), who abruptly fled from the U.K. after Sarah's accident. Along with two old friends and a new acquaintance of Juno's, the group embark on a cave expedition that takes a turn for the worse after a rock fall leaves them stranded in an uncharted cave with no map and only a handful of supplies to last them the rest of the trip. As tensions arise in the group, they are faced with another danger -- one whose love of the dark is as strong as its lust for blood. Opening to rave reviews in the U.K. in July of 2005, the creature-feature went on to show at the Venice Film Festival and garnered the top prize for Euro feature at Sweden's Fantastic Film Festival. The Descent was picked up for future U.S. distribution by Lion's Gate, whose work was cut out for them considering the tame opening of the similarly-themed stateside production of The Cave in late-August of the same year. ~ Jeremy Wheeler, Rovi