Screenhead

So the folks out at Lions Gate sent me a copy of The Descent 2 to write up, and I have to admit, I was pretty scared…when I heard this one existed.  I was thoroughly prepared to file this under “unnecessary sequels”.  And as it turned out, I had the filing down.

The Descent 2 picks up where the last one left off, as Sarah Carter, last survivor of the Appalachian caves, emerges from the depths to wake up in a hospital.   Needless to say, the cops don’t exactly find her story about a race of flesh-eating monsters in the caves a decent explanation for what happened to her friends, so the cops haul her back to go into the caves with a rescue team.  And of course, the team runs afoul of the so-called crawlers…but not even Sarah is prepared for all the horrors that lie beneath the soil, as she discovers there’s a new kind of beastie in town.

The upshot to this movie, of course, is that all the claustrophobic horror of the original is very much intact.  If tight spaces freak you out then this thing will have you whimpering with your pants full.  Lots and LOTS of tight spaces here.

The down side is that pretty much nothing BUT the claustrophobic horror of the original is here.  Even the blood effects look a low-budget orangish.  Oh, sure, there’s at least a few visceral thrills going on, watching heads get busted and things get eaten, but beyond that, there really isn’t much here that’s all that scary.  In fact, it’s actually kind of depressing.

I have to give them credit for trying–there will be a couple decent surprise twists here, and they really were going for something with an advanced degree of difficulty.  After all, half the point of The Descent was that we didn’t know what was going on down there.  But with The Descent 2, we DO know what’s going on before we even walk into the cave.  It’s hard to scare people when they know where all the scares will be coming from.

But still, at the end of the day, they just couldn’t bring the scary, and that leaves us with a tepid, half-baked cave crawler that’s really only scary if you’re a claustrophobe or you didn’t see the first installment.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives The Descent 2 a four out of ten, for trying, and mostly failing, at something that would’ve been hard for anyone to pull off.

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