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. 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 Limeys 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 albino flesh-hungry terrors.
An entirely superfluous sequel with many scenes cribbed wholesale from Marshall’s viscerally scary original, The Descent 2 avoids direct-to-rental ignominy by attempting to organically further the existing story rather than just rehashing the premise with a new set of Crawler-fodder. As many other cash-hungry horror continuations do. That being said the return of MacDonald as survivor Sarah is 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.
What Part 2 does have though is a notable upsurge of “ick” factor in comparison to its predecessor as everyone regularly gets covered in all kinds of goo, and a couple of decent new set-piece ideas. Most notable of these is the early(ish) cave-in scene where rescue teamster Cath (Anna Skellern) gets 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 terrors of claustrophobia and creatures that The Descent is all about.
[etRating value=“ 3”]
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