Movies That Suck: The Descent Part 2 (2009)

I'm normally not a person who's automatically against sequels to anything. Even if I really like a movie that has a very definite conclusion, if a sequel is announced I will look forward to it, even if there's no reason for it to be made other than money (which is the case with most sequels). The same goes for The Descent Part 2. Even though I felt the story didn't need to go any further after the first film's elegantly bleak ending, I was excited when I heard a sequel was coming. But, through a lot of delays, I had to wait three years after I saw the first movie. The movie was finally released in UK theaters in December of 2009 and went straight to DVD here the following spring. I didn't see it until September of that year and, man, let me tell you, this movie proves that just because you can do a sequel doesn't mean you should. Everything that was great, scary, and tragic about the first film is messed up beyond repair here. This is just an unnecessary, stupid, paint by numbers horror sequel whose director learned nothing from the one who made the original.

Picking up right after the events of the original, The Descent Part 2 begins with Sarah, the lone survivor of the group of women spelunkers from the first movie, having escaped from the cave and found in the wilderness covered with blood and scared out of her mind. Meanwhile, a rescue team has spent the last two days searching for Sarah and her friends. The sheriff in charge is notified that Sarah has been found but when he and his deputy visit her in the hospital, they find out that she has no memory of what happened. When a mineshaft that leads down into the cave system is discovered, the sheriff demands that Sarah accompany him, the deputy, and three caving specialists in searching the caves for the rest of the missing women. Once down there, another cave-in occurs that traps the group and it isn't long before they begin to fall prey to the hideous crawlers.

Neil Marshall had no interest in directing a sequel so he handed the director's chair to Jon Harris, who was the editor on the first film and has actually been nominated for an Oscar for his editing work on 127 Hours. So far, The Descent Part 2 is his only stint as director and I hope that it stays that way because while he may be a sought after editor, this guy cannot direct to save his life. I don't think he learned anything from Marshall about how to create tension or how to light something to make it look scary. But I can't blame him for the lackluster story. Oh, no, I have three people to blame for that. If Marshall wasn't going to direct, I wish he would have at least written this film since he wrote the first movie as well. Instead, we have three screenwriters, James McCarthy, J. Blakeson, and James Watkins, and none of them were able to come up with a story that was even decent. Instead, the story is cliched, peppered with bad scares, has none of the tension of the original, and the new characters are so cardboard that you don't care about any of them and the two returning ones are wasted.

Shauna Macdonald and Natalie Mendoza both return as Sarah and Juno but you can tell that their hearts aren't in it anymore and they're just collecting a paycheck. When it's revealed that Sarah has amnesia and doesn't remember the events of the first movie, I immediately rolled my eyes. Amnesia is a lazy and contrived plot device that belongs in soap opera, not movies. Here, it's just an excuse to get her back down in the caves and once she's down there, she instantly remembers everything that happened and goes off on her own. That's pretty much it for the rest of the movie is her trying to find her way out of the caves... again. She barely has any dialogue which is even worse. Macdonald does what she can but to me, it just feels like all she's doing is going through the motions with the limited material she has to work with. Furthermore, the way it's explained how she got out of the cave the first time is really poor. You'd expect it to follow the ending of the American version where she clearly escaped but no. Sarah says that she got washed out of the cave by an underground stream. That sounds more like something that probably happened to her after the original UK ending where she was still trapped in the cave. In fact, I think the script originally opened with the UK ending of the original and went on with Sarah following the delusion of her daughter and jumping down into an underground lake. It still would have been crap but at least it would have made more sense. Why they decided not to do that I have no clue but there's supposedly a still from it so it could have been filmed and not included on the DVD. Oh, and Sarah dies at the end, just as we assumed she did after the UK ending of the original movie or maybe even after the American one. So, she survived the events of the first movie and made it out of the cave only to end up back in the cave and get killed. In other words, her presence in this sequel was completely pointless.

As for Juno, her presence is even more idiotic and pointless. First off, how has she survived being trapped in the caves with the crawlers for at least a couple of days now? At the end of the first movie, Sarah wounded her in the leg with a pickaxe and left her to be killed by a horde of crawlers. I know we didn't actually see her get killed but are they suggesting that she was able to kill off all those crawlers with only a pickaxe and a wounded leg as well? I know she was able to kill a lot of the crawlers in the first movie but during those times she was either fighting one at a time or fighting off a bunch with someone helping her. And she wasn't seriously injured either. Even if she did somehow fend off those crawlers, what has she been living on to keep her strength up? I don't think there's much available food in a cave. Her being alive in this movie is just really stretching it. More so, you would expect an epic confrontation between her and Sarah and maybe an eventual resolution of their differences. Well, you're half-right. Juno comes into the movie late and doesn't encounter Sarah until it's almost over. They have a brief skirmish, exchange some heated words later, and during the climax when Juno is fatally injured, she tells Sarah that she's sorry before dying in her arms and Sarah does forgive her... and that's it. Well, that was a wasted subplot. Why bring her back into the movie and have her meet up with Sarah again if you're not going to do anything with the hatred the two of them have between each other? If you wanted to have them eventually resolve their bitterness, at least have Juno show up much earlier, become trapped with Sarah, and make it so that the two of them either have to put their differences aside and escape or keep fighting and either kill each other or be killed by the crawlers. Natalie Mendoza, like Macdonald, does what she can and still comes across as a bad ass but there's just so much wasted potential.

The three members of the rescue team that venture down into the caves, Dan (Douglas Hodge), Greg (Joshua Dallas), and Cath (Anna Skellern), are really cardboard and forgettable. You assume that they're friends and have been working together for a long time but you learn virtually nothing about them other than Dan is the head of the group (and talks a lot like Jason Statham) and refuses to take orders from the gruff, arrogant sheriff (I'll get to him shortly), that Dan and Cath are possibly a couple judging from how the two of them talk to each other when Cath is trapped after the cave-in and it's clear that they can't get her out, and that Greg is hot-headed (judging from how angry he gets at a reporter who says something inappropriate to them when they come back from searching in the opening scene) and a slight horndog. That's it. There's nothing else to these characters. There's none of the development or personality of the women from the first film.

The most unlikable character is Sheriff Vaines (Gavan O'Herlihy), who is not only a douchebag but is downright stupid. EVERYTHING that happens in the movie is his fault. It was his stupid idea to drag Sarah back down into the caves (yeah, a woman who's half-crazed with fear and hysteria is going to be a big help) in the first place. Second, he's so arrogant that he refuses to leave his revolver behind despite Dan's warning that a gunshot could cause a cave-in. So, who guess whose fault it is that the cave-in happens? When Sarah runs off into the cave, he runs after, cocks his gun, and accidentally shoots when a crawler startles him. Even if that crawler hadn't popped up, he was still ready to shoot so, either way, everything that happens would have been his fault. But the stupidest thing he does is when Sarah and Rios disagree with Juno about which way they should go. He agrees with Juno and to make sure that Sarah has to follow them, he handcuffs himself to her, saying, "I brought you down here and I'm going to take you back up." Even worse is when they have to cross a chasm and when Sarah says they should really do it one at a time, he says, "You may have run out on her but you're not running out on me." This guy knows by now that Sarah didn't kill the other women as he originally thought after they found Rebecca's body. Why does he still have a thorn up his ass and is still treating her like a murder suspect? So, of course, the natural bridge over the chasm collapses and he almost gets Sarah killed as well as himself. I'll get to his ridiculous death later but he's just an unlikable, annoying, stupid asshole of a character and I was finally glad when he bought it... too bad the movie was almost over by that point.

The only new character who I kind of cared about was deputy Ellen Rios (Krysten Cummings). She's the sympathetic yin to Sheriff Vaines' assholish yang. She's not as quick to assume that Sarah is a killer as Vaines is and since she's the one who ends up running through the cave with Sarah, the two of them sort of become close. The only reason that even happens is because Rios has a young daughter just like Sarah did and it makes Sarah more determined to help Rios escape (not that it matters because her heroic sacrifice at the end to do so ends up being vain). Just like the thing between Sarah and Juno, that could have made for an interesting aspect of the film but it's barely even touched on and when it is, it's near the end of the film and has little time to become a factor.

The character who just baffles me and is responsible for the film's idiotic ending is Ed Oswald (Michael J. Reynolds). He's the character who finds Sarah at the beginning and leads the rescue team to the mineshaft that joins into the cave system. He gives a suspicious wink to one of the women (I can't remember if it was Rios or Cath) as they go down the elevator into the mine, so you know something's up. But nothing prepares you for the out of nowhere ending of the film. After Rios, the only survivor, makes it back to the surface and is about to call for help, Oswald comes out of nowhere, whacks her over the head with a shovel, and drags her body back to the hole so the crawlers eat her. What was that all about? Is Oswald the one that's keep the crawlers fed and content in the cave so they don't start wandering around the surface? Does he feel they need to be protected? Are they his pets? Is he just a serial killer and uses the crawlers to clean up after him? I'll accept whatever explanation but you can't just throw this out of nowhere and not expect me to completely baffled by it. You can just tell that they had no good ideas for an ending so they just pulled this out of thin air. Just such lazy script-writing.

Two major reasons why this film fails to capture the creepiness of its predecessor are the production design and the cinematography. It's interesting because Simon Bowles returned to build the sets for this film but this time, the design of the cave isn't as convincing. I can't explain it but in this movie, it really does look like a set whereas in the first movie, it looked like a real cave. One explanation could be that all the spaces of the cave are very small and enclosed in this one. While the first movie did have a lot of claustrophobic spaces, there were also a lot of big open chambers in the cave. The scope of this film just seems smaller (maybe this one had a smaller budget than the original, which was pretty low budget already) and therefore, it doesn't match up with the cave of the original film even it's supposed to be the same one. Besides that, the production design just doesn't look good. You can tell that the walls are made of plaster instead of rock and it damages the movie's credibility considerably. Another reason why the production design looks bad is because of the lighting. Like Simon Bowles, Sam McCurdy, the director of photography on the first film returned for this one but I don't know what happened because the lighting in this film is terrible. Remember how pitch black and realistic the original looked? Well, that's botched here because the caverns in this film are way too brightly lit. It gets really cumbersome when the actors are making it seem as if it's really dark by putting their hands out in front of them or turning their flashlights on or looking at infrared mode on the camera when it's so obviously bright. Maybe Jon Harris didn't know how instruct McCurdy on lighting the set or what but that's primarily what exposes the cave as actually being a set and destroys what tension could have been derived from it because you can see everything.

I'm starting to think it is because of Harris' poor direction that everything looks so bad because makeup artist Paul Hyett and his team also returned from the first film but here, the crawlers are really badly designed. Once again, I guess you could blame that on the lighting and that you get too many clear views of the crawlers as a result but they also just don't look as scary as they did originally. In fact, they look kind of stupid. Their ears tend to be way too big, they now have serrated teeth, and you can tell that their faces are made up of prosthetics and it just looks ridiculous. They also don't look blind when you get the brief glimpses of their eyes. The eyes don't seem to be glazed over as they were originally. Harris supposedly tried to give the crawlers a more camouflage nature where they can blend in with the surrounding rock better but there's only one instance where it kind of works and that's when Sarah gets her very first glimpse of one of them at the beginning. The rest of the time, you see them movie in the out of focus background when they're blending in so no tension builds. Harris also doesn't really take the chance to show a lot of different genders and types of crawlers. Like before, you only see one obviously female crawler, which makes me wonder how so many of these things were produced if there aren't that many females. There are no baby crawlers either as were encountered before. The only major introduction is this big, buff Arnold Schwarzenegger crawler that they see dragging down an elk carcass from the tunnel that leads to the surface. Are there steroids in some of the stuff they eat because he is huge! He's the one who ultimately kills Juno although both she and Sarah manage to finish him off (Sarah actually strangles him from behind, which makes him look a lot less tough than he should have been). I know I sound overly nitpicky but I just wish Harris would have changed up more by showing more female crawlers, baby crawlers, even newborns and old, sickly ones. I'm just saying that would have been more creative and interesting to see than these stupid looking camouflaged crawlers (again, to me anyway).

One thing Jon Harris did seem intent on was being a lot more disgusting than the first movie. Yes, the first movie was very gory and savage in its violence and the crawlers were gross with their pale, slick nude bodies, blind eyes, bat-like ears, and constant drooling but it worked for the film. This movie, however, is needlessly sick at points in an effort just to make the audience go, "Ew!" First, they find Rebecca's body very early on and it looks like she might still be alive because her mouth and throat are moving like she's breathing... and then a rat crawls out of her mouth. What was the point of that, honestly? There's another instance where Cath and Greg find Sam's decomposing body still hanging climbing rope where she was killed and they have to use her body to get across the chasm. Cath falls underneath the body and has to hang on when blood starts leaking out the wound and drips all over Cath's face. Again, pointless and put there just to be gross. I also didn't need to see Sarah spit a wad into a stream for no reason. I know she threw up both in the original and in this film but there were reasons for that. But the most over the top gross moment by far is when Sarah and Rios fall into this pit that's full of black liquid and this mushy, dark brown substance. It's obvious from the get go what it is but just in case you didn't figure it out, a crawler walks up to the side of the pit, turns around, takes a crap, and walks away. Yeah, I really wanted to see one of those things relieve itself. I was just speechless when I saw that the first time. That is the pinnacle of unnecessary grossness. Even of the making of on the DVD, they called that the "shit pit." I don't think I have to say anything else.

As for the actual makeup and gore effects in the movie, they're pretty standard when compared to those in the original. There's still quite a bit of blood but it doesn't feel like there's as much as there was originally. It's the standard stuff: throats being ripped open, fingers being bitten off, a couple of crawlers get their heads crushed (both of which are obviously hollow), and a lot of bloodletting from pickaxes. One crawler dies when Rios stabs him in the throat with a hairpin but blood gushes out like she put a butcher knife in his neck! The stupidest death by far is that of Sheriff Vaines. Remember when I told you they have to cross over a chasm but he refuses to unlock the handcuffs connecting himself and Sarah? Well, the bridge collapses and he's hanging over the chasm with Sarah on the ledge trying to pull him up. When they can't pull him up and they see several crawlers climbing up the chasm after them, Juno gives Rios a pickaxe and tells her cut off Vaines' hand! She then proceeds to do so but it goes on for a long time and is really over the top and silly. I was glad that Vaines was dead but man, that was a stupid way to do away with him. You also seem some fairly convincing dead animals and human corpses that the crawlers are feeding on during the climax but for the most part, there's not much to write home about makeup effects-wise.

David Julyan is credited with doing the music again but I honestly don't think they had come in and write anything new because they repeat every single note of the original score. Nothing seems to have been changed or added. Not only that but the main theme had this arc in the original where it was introduced at the beginning and when it comes back at the end, some new notes are added to it and they do the exact same thing here. If a movie's music score is good, I do like it when it's carried over to the sequel but you have to at least do something different as well. Otherwise, it's just second verse, same as the verse and that's not interesting at all. If you can point out any pieces of music in The Descent Part 2 that weren't in the original, I will give you a medal. But for now, I'm saying that the filmmakers got lazy and decided to completely reuse the original's depressing music score and not be creative and actually add to it.

The Descent Part 2 is the exact type of sequel that you always dread. It's stupid, cliched, unoriginal, the returning characters are wasted and the new ones are either cardboard, undeveloped, or downright unlikable, the creepy mood is destroyed by the over-lit sets, the crawlers look bad, there are too many pointlessly disgusting instances, and the entire music score from the original is completely reused. The Descent was a well made, scary, and tragic horror film that was perfect on its own and didn't need a sequel, especially not one like this. Neil Marshall is credited as executive producer but I wonder if he had any input in the film at all because I would like to think that if he had seen how the movie was coming along, he would have stepped and told them that this wasn't looking too good (then again, Marshall did go on to make Doomsday and Centurion so maybe he lost his grasp on what's good and what's bad). I think I heard rumors that there was going to be a third film but since this wasn't as well received as the original, I doubt that it will happen now. I personally hope it doesn't but if it does, the filmmakers are going to have to up their game substantially or it'll crash and burn like this did. Final thought: The Descent Part 2 just sucks. If you like it, that's cool but I'm going to stick with the creepy original and pretend like this never existed. To me, the story ends where it should have: with Sarah trapped in the cave, having completely lost her mind, and about to become lunch for the crawlers. It's depressing, yeah, but I'll take that over the idiotic turn the story took in this piece of junk any day.