The Descent: Part 2
(2009 movie)
If you ever had any illusion that The Descent was a good movie, you really might want to avoid its sequel. Not only is it filled to the brim with the standard horror movie clichés, it's also basically the plot of the first movie all over again, with very few differences, only now it makes even less sense.
The movie starts with the standard misdirection scare when some old hillbilly type manages to barely avoid running down a deer, only to have Sarah slam up against the window in exactly the same fashion as the jump scare in the first movie's fake ending. And really, this is where the movie starts to not make sense, but only later on as the stupid adds up.
The movie doesn't take as much time to set things up this time, very quickly expositing things like Juno being a senator's daughter and that there are cave specialists searching for the missing women from the first movie, but in the wrong cave since Juno didn't report which cave they were going to, and a well-meaning Holly, having been mislead, filed a plan with the authorities for the wrong cave. But since Sarah turned up, they now have a lead, though the movie also goes out of its way to try to say no one will end up knowing what happens later on due to the Sherriff's insistence that a lid be kept on this new lead. Conveniently, Sarah has amnesia for the past few days, and even relives the death of her husband and daughter just to tug at our heart strings. Since she's covered in blood and has obviously been in a fight, the sheriff immediately suspects she's killed her friends. When the lab matches one of the blood types she's covered in with Juno, the sheriff really suspects her, then for no logical reason decides to drag the obviously traumatized woman back down into the cave she escaped from to help them look for the other women.
Why the sheriff's office is running this investigation is but one of many things that don't quite add up. For instance, one of the first things that happens after Sarah is found, presumably having been taken in by the old hillbilly and having been reported by him, is that the same old hillbilly leads a deputy with a bloodhound to the entrance to an old mine so they can do the standard scene where the dog gets scared and comes out whimpering before taking off in the opposite direction. Then, an the assembled team of the sheriff, a female deputy, Sarah and the three-person cave rescue team goes down into the mine using an ancient elevator that magically still works so they can get down a shaft that would have been impossible for Sarah to scale, and end up at a boarded up cave entrance that was where some miners were said to have disappeared down. Of course, the entrance was still boarded up, which makes one wonder just how the hell Sarah managed to get out of there. It was at this point that I'd already started to give up on the movie due to the utter lack of basic logic, but I was still going to give it a chance.
After the team made it further into the cave they found the half-eaten body of one of the women, and even though it was pretty obviously done by an animal, the sheriff suspects Sarah (a running theme if you haven't noticed), which isn't helped when she conveniently remembers the Morlocks and freaks out, injuring one of the cave rescuers in the process. What happens next is pretty much the same as what happened in the first movie, complete with an isolating cave-in. Then the characters are picked off one by one, only this time they act a lot more stupidly than the characters in the first movie. And magically, Sarah, and as it turns out Juno, have become completely hardened bad-asses who can kill the cave dwellers more or less at will. Of course to survive the ending of the first movie, Juno, who'd had a pick-axe put through her calf by Sarah, would have had to fight off at least a dozen of the things, whereas Sarah was pretty much just staring into the flame of her make-shift torch while more crawlers called off in the distance. Apparently having a big sharp piece of metal put through her leg wasn't so bad for Juno after all, because she moves like it never happened.
Anyway, the sheriff, being the dumbest of all of the characters, ends up handcuffing Sarah as soon as he gets the chance, despite the protests from the deputy she saved, and really just common sense given where they were at. Naturally, they get to a part of the cave where the combined weight of Sarah and the sheriff causes a collapse and both of them are left hanging for their lives. This is another point where nothing makes sense, because without much hesitation and Juno egging her on, the deputy brutally cuts off the hand of the sheriff, sending him to his death. You know, a man she was made out to have the utmost respect for and had probably worked with for quite a while, because she is supposed to be one of his most trusted deputies, and she kills him, just like that, because Juno and Sarah have both become hardened survival experts who believe in sacrificing others to save their own skin, yet inexplicably not only let bygones be bygones between them but have taken a liking to the deputy and so decide to save her. *takes breath* And the stupid isn't even over yet even if the movie basically is.
It was fairly obvious from almost the beginning of the movie that the deputy was supposed to be the protagonist, though it does shift around quite a bit. But as the movie moves on it focuses more and more on her. So when the three of them finally find a way out of the cave and they have to sneak past a bunch of feasting cave dwellers, both Juno and Sarah end up dead, having lost their main character immunity. Actually that scene in particular is so horribly over the top that it's laughable. Only to add to that, the deputy wriggles her way out of the cave through a hole that minutes ago had been big enough for a giant cave dweller to drag a moose through, in what looks like a direct rip-off of the fake ending from the first movie. And just so as not to disappoint us that it wasn't a complete rip-off, there's no happy ending after all. Actually I was expecting one of the cave dwellers to have come out after her, but it turned out to be the old hillbilly, who suddenly appeared out of no where to take the deputy out with a shovel to the face. He then drags her back to the hole so the creatures can get her, the implication being that he's keeping the secret of these things' existence for some unknown reason.
And really, that right there is where the stupid hits full force, because if the old hillbilly had actually been serving this role all along, why then hadn't he done the same thing at the beginning of the movie when Sarah first showed up? And since there actually are a few more people who knew where the team went in and what they were up to, how would killing the deputy keep the secret anything more than temporarily? After all, as soon as the other people who knew about the other cave figured out something bad happened to the other team, there'd be yet another search, and it'd just keep going like that until someone finally managed to get back with information about these creatures. But really what it comes down to is that this movie shouldn't have happened, because the old hillbilly should have killed Sarah at the beginning of it. The ending just doesn't jive with how he brought Sarah in to the hospital and cooperated with authorities in the beginning.
Now while the first movie was pretty much just okay, this one was definitely bad. Not only was it filled with the same clichés and gross-out stuff (some of them had to hide out in the Morlock's toilet), but it actually ripped off the first movie quite a bit on top of it all. None of the characters were the least bit interesting, and even if the deputy managed to be a little sympathetic, she still did enough stupid things and failed to be interesting enough on her own for me to care what happened to her. So as you might guess, I was underwhelmed and unimpressed with this movie. 1/10.
(2009 movie)
If you ever had any illusion that The Descent was a good movie, you really might want to avoid its sequel. Not only is it filled to the brim with the standard horror movie clichés, it's also basically the plot of the first movie all over again, with very few differences, only now it makes even less sense.
The movie starts with the standard misdirection scare when some old hillbilly type manages to barely avoid running down a deer, only to have Sarah slam up against the window in exactly the same fashion as the jump scare in the first movie's fake ending. And really, this is where the movie starts to not make sense, but only later on as the stupid adds up.
The movie doesn't take as much time to set things up this time, very quickly expositing things like Juno being a senator's daughter and that there are cave specialists searching for the missing women from the first movie, but in the wrong cave since Juno didn't report which cave they were going to, and a well-meaning Holly, having been mislead, filed a plan with the authorities for the wrong cave. But since Sarah turned up, they now have a lead, though the movie also goes out of its way to try to say no one will end up knowing what happens later on due to the Sherriff's insistence that a lid be kept on this new lead. Conveniently, Sarah has amnesia for the past few days, and even relives the death of her husband and daughter just to tug at our heart strings. Since she's covered in blood and has obviously been in a fight, the sheriff immediately suspects she's killed her friends. When the lab matches one of the blood types she's covered in with Juno, the sheriff really suspects her, then for no logical reason decides to drag the obviously traumatized woman back down into the cave she escaped from to help them look for the other women.
Why the sheriff's office is running this investigation is but one of many things that don't quite add up. For instance, one of the first things that happens after Sarah is found, presumably having been taken in by the old hillbilly and having been reported by him, is that the same old hillbilly leads a deputy with a bloodhound to the entrance to an old mine so they can do the standard scene where the dog gets scared and comes out whimpering before taking off in the opposite direction. Then, an the assembled team of the sheriff, a female deputy, Sarah and the three-person cave rescue team goes down into the mine using an ancient elevator that magically still works so they can get down a shaft that would have been impossible for Sarah to scale, and end up at a boarded up cave entrance that was where some miners were said to have disappeared down. Of course, the entrance was still boarded up, which makes one wonder just how the hell Sarah managed to get out of there. It was at this point that I'd already started to give up on the movie due to the utter lack of basic logic, but I was still going to give it a chance.
After the team made it further into the cave they found the half-eaten body of one of the women, and even though it was pretty obviously done by an animal, the sheriff suspects Sarah (a running theme if you haven't noticed), which isn't helped when she conveniently remembers the Morlocks and freaks out, injuring one of the cave rescuers in the process. What happens next is pretty much the same as what happened in the first movie, complete with an isolating cave-in. Then the characters are picked off one by one, only this time they act a lot more stupidly than the characters in the first movie. And magically, Sarah, and as it turns out Juno, have become completely hardened bad-asses who can kill the cave dwellers more or less at will. Of course to survive the ending of the first movie, Juno, who'd had a pick-axe put through her calf by Sarah, would have had to fight off at least a dozen of the things, whereas Sarah was pretty much just staring into the flame of her make-shift torch while more crawlers called off in the distance. Apparently having a big sharp piece of metal put through her leg wasn't so bad for Juno after all, because she moves like it never happened.
Anyway, the sheriff, being the dumbest of all of the characters, ends up handcuffing Sarah as soon as he gets the chance, despite the protests from the deputy she saved, and really just common sense given where they were at. Naturally, they get to a part of the cave where the combined weight of Sarah and the sheriff causes a collapse and both of them are left hanging for their lives. This is another point where nothing makes sense, because without much hesitation and Juno egging her on, the deputy brutally cuts off the hand of the sheriff, sending him to his death. You know, a man she was made out to have the utmost respect for and had probably worked with for quite a while, because she is supposed to be one of his most trusted deputies, and she kills him, just like that, because Juno and Sarah have both become hardened survival experts who believe in sacrificing others to save their own skin, yet inexplicably not only let bygones be bygones between them but have taken a liking to the deputy and so decide to save her. *takes breath* And the stupid isn't even over yet even if the movie basically is.
It was fairly obvious from almost the beginning of the movie that the deputy was supposed to be the protagonist, though it does shift around quite a bit. But as the movie moves on it focuses more and more on her. So when the three of them finally find a way out of the cave and they have to sneak past a bunch of feasting cave dwellers, both Juno and Sarah end up dead, having lost their main character immunity. Actually that scene in particular is so horribly over the top that it's laughable. Only to add to that, the deputy wriggles her way out of the cave through a hole that minutes ago had been big enough for a giant cave dweller to drag a moose through, in what looks like a direct rip-off of the fake ending from the first movie. And just so as not to disappoint us that it wasn't a complete rip-off, there's no happy ending after all. Actually I was expecting one of the cave dwellers to have come out after her, but it turned out to be the old hillbilly, who suddenly appeared out of no where to take the deputy out with a shovel to the face. He then drags her back to the hole so the creatures can get her, the implication being that he's keeping the secret of these things' existence for some unknown reason.
And really, that right there is where the stupid hits full force, because if the old hillbilly had actually been serving this role all along, why then hadn't he done the same thing at the beginning of the movie when Sarah first showed up? And since there actually are a few more people who knew where the team went in and what they were up to, how would killing the deputy keep the secret anything more than temporarily? After all, as soon as the other people who knew about the other cave figured out something bad happened to the other team, there'd be yet another search, and it'd just keep going like that until someone finally managed to get back with information about these creatures. But really what it comes down to is that this movie shouldn't have happened, because the old hillbilly should have killed Sarah at the beginning of it. The ending just doesn't jive with how he brought Sarah in to the hospital and cooperated with authorities in the beginning.
Now while the first movie was pretty much just okay, this one was definitely bad. Not only was it filled with the same clichés and gross-out stuff (some of them had to hide out in the Morlock's toilet), but it actually ripped off the first movie quite a bit on top of it all. None of the characters were the least bit interesting, and even if the deputy managed to be a little sympathetic, she still did enough stupid things and failed to be interesting enough on her own for me to care what happened to her. So as you might guess, I was underwhelmed and unimpressed with this movie. 1/10.