‘The Descent Part 2’ Makes for a Fascinating Failure
Chad Collins
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Jon Harris’ The Descent Part 2, which premiered August 24, 2009 at Fantasy Filmfest, was misconceived from inception. Contemporaneous horror fans know well enough how the United States theatrical release truncated the ending to Neil Marshall’s horror classic. Where Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) successfully escapes stateside, the extended (original) ending pulls the oldest trick in the book—it was all a hallucination. Sarah reawakens in the cave to the specter of her deceased daughter across from her. The camera pans out as darkness envelops Sarah. Roll credits.
While “it’s just a dream” is a hoary horror cliché, with Marshall’s The Descent, it worked remarkably well. It’s truthfully the only way the movie could have ended. As the five spelunkers combat the externality of their internal trauma, escape isn’t the point—reconciliation, with both themselves and others, is. That The Descent Part 2 canonically follows the revised ending is itself a major knock against it. Horror fans often decry remakes and sequels, arguing that their mere existence somehow, someway, retroactively hurts the original. Rarely is that ever the case, though here, it’s so narratively unorthodox, that it legitimately risks denigrating the classic that came before.
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Misguided at every turn, The Descent Part 2 is a fascinating case study in serializing horror classics, a worthwhile interrogation of the folly of resurrecting the dead. The Descent was never about the crawlers. They don’t even earnestly make an appearance until the third act. Conversely, The Descent Part 2 is incredulously convinced those subterranean humanoids were what drew audiences to the original. Not the quintet of women, not Marshall’s oppressively claustrophobic direction, and not the keen exploration of distinctly feminine grief and retribution. Just the monsters. Resultantly, The Descent Part 2 has a lot of them.
That The Descent Part 2 works at all is a credit to Harris’ direction. As editor for The Descent and 127 Hours among others, Harris has an astute eye for fluid images, for the claustrophobic possibilities of proximal cave space, its many caverns, and tight corridors. While The Descent Part 2 remains his only directorial outing, it’s a promising debut—Harris augments what would otherwise be almost offensively miscalculated.
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Among the sundry sins—mere existence notwithstanding—are some of the most capricious obstacles this side of Boreham Caverns. Sarah is illogically amnesiac (though only when the plot demands it), remembering nothing of her time in the unexplored cave system. Law enforcement wantonly violates civil rights, demanding Sarah accompany a miniature search and rescue team into the system she just escaped to find her missing friends. Sheriff Vaines (Gavan O’Herlihy) makes R. Lee Ermey’s Sheriff Hoyt look like a peach. He brings a gun into the system despite explicit warnings not to. Later, he senselessly discharges the firearm, causing the subsequent cave collapse that informs most of Part 2’s tension. Late in the film, despite the obvious crawler threat, he handcuffs Sarah to his wrist. Why? Just because, that’s why.
Characters who should be dead are back again. The crawlers, shrewdly conceived in Marshall’s original, are beholden to the most perfunctory of behavioral rules. What they’re capable of hearing is never clear. In The Descent, every breath was a threat to safety. Here, crawlers wander out of frame and key cast members immediately start talking at full volume. While the many jolts are effective (presuming the volume is loud enough), they’re never earned. The crawlers are simply there to scare whether they organically should be or not.
And the system itself, drenched in darkness in Marshall’s originally, is egregiously front-lit. While some complained that the first often obscured too much, it worked to its benefit. The Descent Part 2 has no secrets. It’s Jonathan Safran Foer—everything is illuminated.
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Yet, despite being so conceptually illogical—including having one of the decade’s worst gotcha endings—The Descent Part 2 isn’t a total wash. While it actively undermines what made the first so effective, Harris’ aforementioned visual eye and some gooey gore maintain interest. At times, Part 2 seems to exist simply to dribble nasty goop into the mouths of its characters. Seriously, a collective five minutes of Part 2 might simply be someone with their mouth agape, gagging as blood, fecal matter, and spit pour into it.
At its simplest, the innate claustrophobia of its conceit claws through the rubble of a superior first movie. Underwater caves, a cavern collapses, and a girlie pop monster death brawl harken back to the original in all the right ways. Pure mimicry—including a verbatim replica of the original’s standout jump—works in the opposite direction.
In an era of legacy sequels, The Descent Part 2 is even more fascinating. The most noteworthy horror marquees of today are dredged up from the past. David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, his forthcoming The Exorcist reboot, Scream, Texas Chainsaw Massacre; just call me Kirby Reed because I could keep going.
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The most profitable scares of today are directly informed by the scares of the past. While remuneratively smart, audience fatigue is no doubt setting in. It additionally begs the question; When is too much too much? In the case of The Descent Part 2, there are times it actively undermines the original. Try watching the first today knowing about its canonical conclusion. It doesn’t work quite as well, does it?
Characters given full arcs—arcs informed by keystone creative forces—are later undermined. Marshall himself, in a 2021 interview with Vulture, argued the same. He remarked, “For my money, the sequel was totally unnecessary.” Expounding on the nature of the industry writ large, Marshall concedes it wasn’t his decision to make. While initially consulted, it was the studio’s movie, not his. Not to wade too deeply into the waters of artistic ownership, but to see an extension of one’s identity extended cinematically, only for it to be pilfered and sold for scraps, is no doubt disheartening, most of all for the person most responsible for it (Marshall is additionally credited as The Descent’s sole writer).
As a fascinating failure, The Descent Part 2 remains a worthwhile case study in legacy horror. A serviceably gory shocker, there are B-movie thrills to retain interest. As part of a larger horror ecosystem, it’s not exactly unconventional. Yet, when assessed against the original and the way its mere existence is rendered detrimental, it’s discouraging. As studios comb through their back catalogs for legacy sequels and remakes, it’s easy to get excited. But it’s worth asking; is this really a cave you want to dive back into?
Categorized:Editorials
