THE DESCENT PART 2

Following up from The Descent (well the American cut since the European one ended rather bleakly), we find Sarah (Shauna McDonald) alive and terrified after escaping the caves and making it back to civilisation. Sadly and yet unsurprisingly she is hurling back into the caves with an inept rescue team to find her missing companions.

If you look at the first Descent film for even ten minutes, you can see why The Descent 2 fails worse than a one legged man in a stand on two feet competition. When the first Descent is making you bite your nails down to the bone, the sequel is making you bite down on your fist just to resist punching the person next to you in utter rage. I mean how the FUCK does a man that stupid become a sheriff? He is bafflingly dumb and though that does lead to one of the more satisfying deaths of the whole film, don’t use this as a reason to go see it. Suspense and tension is chucked out the window in favour of loud things going 'bleh’. Thankfully Neil Marshall doesn’t return to direct, rather the editor of the first movie has muscled his way in. At the risk of sounding very up myself, I don’t think director Jon Harris really ‘got’ the first movie. One of the main reasons the first movie is that scary is because of its first half. Completely monster-free, the first half of Marshall’s film relies on characters and the very real fear of being trapped. Marshall establishes characters early on and makes you care and so when the their expedition into the cave goes pear-shaped, you are with them as they struggle to get out. Especially when they scrape and crawl through that next narrow space. Marshall piles on the dread and this is way before we see the monsters hiss and growl around them. Part 2 contains none of this. Instead we are plunged headlong into monster-town and while the filmmakers hoped that it would grab the audience by the scruff of the neck and shake them till we were disorientated, emotional and exhausted. Instead we wind confused, bored and suffering from a serious case of who-gives-a-shit. It suffers from a common creature-feature problem where when the monster is right in front of us, its loses its threat. So like if your characters stumble into a large group of nasties and must wander among them to find a way out (oh…the creatures are blind) and these things are just hanging out, they are not very scary anymore! When you don’t see them, THEN you feel that fear for when the fuck they’ll jump out and eat your face.

I will admit that the gore is, at times, kind of cool. Though no amount of squashed heads will make me forgive this films other crimes (well maybe one more than this film had).

The Descent Part 2 fails on almost every count. Though the gore does make you want to cheer, it doesn’t really deserve it. Its lacks any other types of horror that its predecessor had in buckets, it’s dumb, dull and very disappointing. Also I must mention the ending, I mean really? Its like being slapped in the face with your very own copy of The Descent causing the plastic bits that go into the middle of the DVD to break and now the disc just rattles around inside the cover getting all scratched, i.e. very annoying.

- Pahl Disasterfield