When we last left Sarah she was dreaming of an escape as she stared into the face of her own personal Hell within the darkness of the uncharted cave system at the end of her descent. The Descent 2 takes off where the first left off, after escaping from what would be her tomb if it wasn’t for a faint light signalling an escape route, Sarah is immediately confused by the events, and can’t come up with any good excuses to why she might be covered in the blood of her spelunking mates. Without a good explanation the police mark her as a suspect to murder and insist she accompany them back into the Hell she escaped to find her missing team.
The characters are entirely made up of fodder for the inbred bat people to hunt, unfortunately they aren’t very good hunters this time around and the body count suffers as much as the story does having these empty characters wandering the caves. Juno (the strong Natalie Mendoza returns in the role) somehow survived the ordeal with both Sarah and the bat people and ‘the bitch is back’ looking for revenge against Sarah. Juno understands she is not the one in control of the situation and decides to keep distance from pulling the skeletons completely out of the closet until she feels she has the upper hand.
I couldn’t tell if the bat people looked worse in this movie or if they were just used in a less subtle way that highlighted their flaws. The body count is low and the kills are cheap. We see more violence against the cave dwellers than the invading humans making them seem weaker than in the original. Some great post mortem corpses are the highlight of the feature, in particular one infested with rats.
The Descent 2 is a far cry from the original, it lacks the directorial abilities of Neil Marshall’s original masterpiece, it cheaply kills characters by having them pitfall, the creatures feel weaker, and the only thing it does well besides a little bit of gore is take away from the original. This movie shouldn’t exist.
