A Long Crawl to Nowhere

Some movies seem to be pitching to a more specialised audience than others. Now, obviously it is not my place to say who deserves to have a film made for them and who doesn’t – and bearing that in mind, I have good news for you if you happen to be a fan of grisly, claustrophobic horror featuring athletic young women caked in gore and excrement: Jon Harris’ The Descent: Part 2 is exactly up your street.

Should you possess Sherlockian powers of insight, you might just be able to reach the conclusion that The Descent: Part 2 is, in fact, a sequel to the 2005 Neil Marshall movie The Descent. Now there are sequels and there are sequels – these days it often seems to be the case that the director has one eye on a potential sequel when making the original film, while sometimes things go even further and a whole series of films is planned at once (usually, it must be said, in relation to a property with an existing fanbase). But sometimes one of your old-school sequels still gets made: a movie turns out to be unexpectedly profitable, to the point where it looks like there may be an audience for another helping.

This is the territory in which we encounter The Descent: Part 2. Should you be unfamiliar, the first film recounted the cheery tale of an all-female group of potholers who get lost in a cave system under the Appalachians, where they encounter a tribe of carnivorous troglodytes. It’s a very good movie and was deservedly successful, but it didn’t immediately scream sequel potential.

However, where there’s a whiff of potential profit, there’s a way: and so in defiance of everything that seemed to be happening at the end of the first movie, it is revealed that Sarah (Shauna McDonald) has indeed escaped from the caves and their nasty inhabitants. And so the movie follows her through counselling, as she slowly comes to terms with her ordeal, and then shows her return to her home in Dundee where she enters into a charming romance with a young solicitor named Duncan…

No, of course it doesn’t. She just gets thrust straight back into the caves along with a load of new characters, as part of a search party. Some of the cast are blokes this time, one of them is Australian, and one of them… well, let’s just say his accent is inclined to wander, so much so that I was put in mind of good old Jason Statham. There is an implicit understanding between the film-makers and the target audience that the sooner the action goes back underground, the sooner we’re going to get to the good stuff. In line with this, all the time-consuming driving and abseiling and crawling and climbing the women had to do in the first film in order to get to the monsters is omitted in favour of everyone just getting into a lift. First floor – gents’ outfitting, ground floor – food court, sub-basement 37 – throat-ripping Pellucidarian chavs. Well, maybe not.

From which point on we have a lot of stuff with people getting separated and wandering around the caves in various groupings, gory combat with the crawlers (which for this movie have developed big flappy ears and a tendency to dribble a lot), an awful lot of jump scares, a fight in a cesspit, and many close-ups of drills and pick-axes entering flesh. Most of which were all there in the first film, of course.

One of the biggest and best scares in The Descent came when characters looking at a cavern through the night-vision scope of a camcorder unexpectedly found it showing an unsuspected, monstrous figure in their midst. Well, this turns out to be one of the biggest and best scares in The Descent: Part 2, as the same camcorder turns up and the new characters watch the footage – which is still joltingly frightening, and one understands why it’s been included. However, what’s more mystifying is why the new film includes a practically identical sequence, with the same elements in the same location – and does so within ten or fifteen seconds of showing the original. It’s not that it isn’t effective, but it does hammer home the idea that this movie has nothing to offer that wasn’t there in the original.

And not everything that made the first film so great reappears this time, either. The remarkable thing about The Descent was that the menace of the crawlers almost felt secondary compared to the horribly claustrophobic cave environment, and the queasy emotional tensions within the group of protagonists that the situation revealed. Well, I suppose there’s a splash of the latter, but it is really dependent on characters being brought back from the dead. However, while I came out of the first one hugely impressed at the way the film-makers had managed to make a movie on location underground (they hadn’t really), this time round the cave sets look like sets most of the time. Very good sets, but still sets.

There is new stuff, but it’s mostly a mixed bag – the blokes in the cast are a fairly forgettable bunch, but Anna Skellern isn’t bad at all. And there’s a good turn from Krysten Cummings, who convincingly unravels and loses her composure as the film progresses – with Macdonald’s character the veteran survivor this time around, it’s Cummings who’s the point of audience identification for much of the movie. (On the DVD, the film-makers say they explicitly rejected the idea of ‘doing Aliens‘ for the sequel – but it appears, in some respects such as Sarah’s characterisation, they ended up doing so anyway.)

None of this makes up for an ending which, while memorably nasty, doesn’t actually appear to make any sense in terms of what we’ve seen and heard in the rest of the movie. Could it be that it was written with a view to expanding the story in a possible third installment? I don’t know. Part 2, certainly, is a very sequelly sequel in that it revives many of the things that made the original so good, but can’t find anything really new or interesting to do with them, and has nothing like the polish, atmosphere or intensity of the first film.