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The Descent: Part 2 carries on the story where the first film left off. Sarah (Shauna MacDonald), the tragic heroine, appears wounded and traumatised on the Appalachian mountains, the sole survivor of the horrors depicted by Neil Marshall in 2005.
With a search resulting in nothing, fear grows as to the fate of her friends, and although Sarah is struck with amnesia, she is sent down the caves again with a search party, in the hope she will remember what happened to her. As with the first film, there are some truly claustrophobic and frightening moments which play on all our fears of the dark, constriction and the unknown; but inevitably, the fear of an unseen terror has been lost. The audience merely sits and waits for the first monster to show itself.
Unfortunately, the new director Jon Harris has toned down the atmosphere of suspense, lazily replacing it with violence, blood and guts. To a certain extent he gets the required jumps and gasps, but he would have done much better not to neglect the psychological exploration which Marshall did so well. The film rehashes too much of the wrong material from its predecessor, some scenes (the rock-fall in particular) exasperatingly similar, although having similar endings does work well.
On the plus side, once more there are strong female leads - this time round paired with their softer sides, but the sense of reverting to primal, animalistic nature in a survival of the fittest scenario never happens. The characters cling to their humanity, and somehow seem too in control; the all-important sense of despair as they are pitted against creatures which have evolved to live in the dark is lost. Leading on from this, there were far too many close-ups of the creature which completely stripped away the atmosphere of tension. Unlike Alien, where the hunter is mainly invisible or just glimpsed throughout the film (a much more effective technique), Harris thrusts the monsters in your face. Along with surprisingly good lighting underground, the film goes through the motions of a horror film, almost as though Harris were using some sort of film-by-numbers.
However, the film isn’t all bad: there is a genuinely terrifying scene involving a trapped woman and a boulder choke which was the highlight of the film - it’s a shame it happened so early on, and there is a good unexpected twist (if you didn’t watch the trailer that is).
Harris has done a poor job seeing as the material he was left to work with was so good. The film, sadly, can only be discarded onto a growing pile of bad sequels. From the start, the director desperately tries to connect Part 2 to Part 1 and what results is a frayed patchwork of tenuous links, the greatest confusion of all being that the end of The Descent is completely disregarded.
Whilst The Descent was described as ‘the most frightening monster movie since Alien’, The Descent: Part 2 fails to live up to that reputation.
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