December 2009
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The Descent: Part 2 (18)
Printed 2nd December 2009

Liked The Descent? Want more of the same? Then The Descent: Part 2 is the film for you.

A virtual retread of the first film, Descent Deux picks up almost immediately after the end of Neil Marshall’s excellent original as a rescue operation is mounted to try to discover what happened to the missing “six chicks with picks” three days after their disappearance down an Appalachian cave.

‘Course last thing we knew four of them had been killed by the “Crawlers” with the last two remaining survivors Juno (Natalie Jackson Mendoza) and Sarah (Shauna MacDonald) still trapped somewhere. So to suddenly find out Sarah escaped and has emotional “amnesia” comes as something of a deus ex machina. But then I guess that’s because us Limey’s didn’t get the alternate ending like they did in the States.

Dragged back down the caves by the dastardly Sheriff (Gavan O’Herlihy) to aid the rescue team despite her current condition, Sarah is forced to reface her nightmares and hopefully regain her survival instincts swiftly as a whole new set of unsuspecting spelunkers are set upon by the albino flesh-hungry monsters.

An entirely superfluous sequel with many scenes cribbed wholesale from Marshall’s viscerally scary original, The Descent 2 avoids the depths of DTR (direct-to-rental) ignominy by virtue of its attempts to organically further the existing story rather than just totally rehashing the premise with a whole new set of Crawler-fodder. As many other cash-hungry horror continuations do.

That being said the return of MacDonald as survivor Sarah is totally needless and hurtful to the credibility of the film. Why couldn’t her whereabouts just be unknown? It would have been much better than the horrible, overused, convenient, soap opera plot device of amnesia. It also could have afforded a cool last reel “surprise” comeback for the character that would have been much more welcome in the context of this follow-on and also opened the two-strong series up for another instalment at the same time.

What Part 2 does have going for it though is a notable upsurge of “ick” factor in comparison to its predecessor as everyone regularly get covered in all kinds of goo and a couple of really quite decent new set-piece ideas. Of which the poo pool combines the two perfectly. Most notable though is the early(ish) cave-in scene after Sheriff Vaines gets his gun off leaving rescue teamster Cath (a cute Anna Skellern) trapped in a “rock pocket” with only the sounds of her sobs and then later a cheeky creepy Crawler for company. It impeccably merges the twin terror of claustrophobia and creatures that The Descent(s) are all about.

The least said about the truly awful, terribly ill-conceived final few minutes the better though (which in roundabouts takes us right back to the same place we were at the end of the original, thus rendering the previous 90-minutes of events redundant). Whoever thought this was a good idea needs to go back to scriptwriting school. It really is so cheap and cliché as well as being telegraphed right from the off. Ga-dush.

So as you can see there are abseils-and-ascends with this Marshall-less Descent. Of course it’s not as good as the original but then at least it doesn’t piss all over its legacy. It’s de(s)cent if you like?

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