Viewed at the Marche du Film, Festival de Cannes 2009
Picking up almost immediately where The Descent left off, the bloodstained Sarah has made it out the cave system, is taken to hospital and then back into the caves as an unwilling member of a rescue party to find her missing friends.
If you saw the first film, then you know what happens in this one. If you know the horror genre, then you know who will get offed, too. None of which matters a hoot, because familiarity breeds respect and cast, director and writers, deliver exactly what viewers want. There are the crawlers, lots of blood, some nicely delivered shocks, plenty of gnarly special effects and women getting down, dirty and deadly with climbing axes, bare hands and lumps of rock.
Because all concerned have resisted the urge to widen the story, introduce new things for the heck of it (such as, I dunno, flying crawlers), The Descent: Part 2 is actually much stronger than is usually the case for sequels.
A left-field twist right at the end could be a set up for part 3, but it's hard to tell. While it didn't come as a surprise (those horror genres again), it did feel a bit tacked-on. But that's a very minor quibble and does nothing to detract from what is a great piece of horror entertainment and a worthy successor to its predecessor.
Picking up almost immediately where The Descent left off, the bloodstained Sarah has made it out the cave system, is taken to hospital and then back into the caves as an unwilling member of a rescue party to find her missing friends.
If you saw the first film, then you know what happens in this one. If you know the horror genre, then you know who will get offed, too. None of which matters a hoot, because familiarity breeds respect and cast, director and writers, deliver exactly what viewers want. There are the crawlers, lots of blood, some nicely delivered shocks, plenty of gnarly special effects and women getting down, dirty and deadly with climbing axes, bare hands and lumps of rock.
Because all concerned have resisted the urge to widen the story, introduce new things for the heck of it (such as, I dunno, flying crawlers), The Descent: Part 2 is actually much stronger than is usually the case for sequels.
A left-field twist right at the end could be a set up for part 3, but it's hard to tell. While it didn't come as a surprise (those horror genres again), it did feel a bit tacked-on. But that's a very minor quibble and does nothing to detract from what is a great piece of horror entertainment and a worthy successor to its predecessor.