The Descent: Part 2 - A Case Study in How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Horror Movie Franchise

I know that the essays on this blog are normally literature related, and don’t normally hone in on reviewing a single piece of work; but after just spending £10.50 on a ticket to see The Descent: Part 2, I feel it is my duty to inform filmmakers everywhere of how to successfully elongate a horror film franchise…or any film franchise for that matter. My Curriculum Vitae on this matter is unimportant, but what is important is that I have a brain.

The first film, The Descent, was actually worthy of a sequel in the first place. There were a number of things which elevated this small British horror movie above the bargain bucket of despair where most of them end up. It cost £3.5M to make and took in nearly $60M. What they did with that £3.5M was create a highly interesting and, in some ways, beautiful movie which developed its own recipe for scares.

1. The first thing to notice is that the entire cast is female. This might seem unimportant, but it actually brings a very interesting dynamic to the script and movie. There is zero testosterone, no chance of a tangled love web developing half way through, and no crass badly-written jokes. This really helped in avoiding the pitfalls of most movies of this ilk, and it was nice to see a change.
2. The scenery was beautiful and more importantly it was shot very well. The cavern system almost worked as a separate character in the movie – a femme fatale. There were beautiful caverns and shiny rocks and wide shots of abyss like drops...all very pretty. But it was in juxtaposition to the tight and confined tunnels that the girls had to squeeze through. The whole thing worked really well.
3. The claustrophobia that the director develops in this movie is, to my mind, unsurpassed. The tunnels look real…and they are really tiny. You instantly imagine what you would feel in there...and it’s a feeling which isn’t good – and I don’t suffer from a fear of confined spaces. If I did, whoa nelly! At the same time, the director doesn’t simply forget that these girls are supposed to be professionals, he doesn’t make it look like a picnic, but they also don’t start screaming as soon as a bit of dust falls in their hair. He has them dirty, sweaty, they look like real cavers – even if they are a bit skinny and shapely.

All of those three things help build up a supreme backdrop and level of tension for what is to come next, and it is only this, which stops it from being too silly. When the monsters show up, their make-up is fairly generic, the idea behind them is a little ludicrous, when they start crawling up the walls like Spiderman you roll your eyes. But, you knew they were coming really, and they did shoot them quite well, keeping them out of the spotlight, not too many jumping in front of the camera, lots of different lighting techniques to keep their make-up mysterious and, less noticeable.

A series of generic horror movie twists occur. The girls are in a different cave system than they thought because the lead nutcase girl thought it would be ‘cool’ to discover it, and she failed to tell anyone so there’s no rescue team coming. Oops, then one of the girls falls down and breaks her ankle, typical, and then they get split up! Oh dear. Although, I will admit, when the girl broke her ankle I muttered ‘shit’ – even generic movie twists can be good if you put the audience in the right mind set.

But they bring it right back with a bit of a fun ending. There has been a recent penchant among horror movie makers to display the violent capability of the hero as well as the killer/monster. The remake of The Hills Have Eyes has an excellent bit where one of the main guys bashes a monsters head in with a wild look on his face not too dissimilar to that of the monster. It’s getting a bit too well used now though, even the tagline for Where the Wild Things Are is, “There's one [a monster] in all of us”. In The Descent they do something a little different, the lead character puts a pick axe in the leg of the girl that got them lost in the first place to give the monsters something to munch on while she makes her escape. Harsh, but good. The whole point about these movies is showing the survivor instincts of the human, what they will go through to survive. The audience was shocked, but they weren’t upset. They were egging her on to run.

So, she gets out. Part 2 on the way.

With all this material and success behind them, with the recipe already written, you would think that making a sequel would be easy. Somehow they fail miserably.

1. The first girl survives and she has amnesia about what has happened to her. The audience is already pissed off that their heroine has forgotten all the lessons she learnt in the first one.
2. The police sheriff, who is such a generic American cop character it makes you pissed off just to look at his beard, forces her to go back into the caves. Can I just say, that wouldn’t happen in a million years! There isn’t a way in hell a doctor would let anyone take an obviously seriously disturbed, probably underfed and dehydrated, patient out of the hospital to go do a bit of caving. Stupid. I know the whole storyline is ludicrous but it is set on planet earth, you can suspend disbelief in the cave because it is almost an alien terrain, but not above ground...messing with the dynamic.
3. They added an annoying male character who makes crass jokes about a female caver. Standard sequel technique, but still, after the all feminine first one, I kind of expected something a little different.
4. They had removed all of the beauty. The caves were dull and unpretty, there were no exciting shots of caverns, and stalagmites (or tites). The first underground scene was a shot of an old mine which was so boring that you expected the Goonies or Indiana Jones to come bounding out of one of the tunnels.
5. There was no claustrophobia! The whole thing hinges on this. Okay, there were two bits, and they both worked really well, I don’t know why they didn’t attempt take it a bit further. At one point, after a roof collapse, one of the cavers is stuck in a gap in the rocks, as the monsters try to dig their way in she has to squeeze through tiny spaces to get out. Its tense, a good scene, but the silly cartoonish death of the monster it finishes with makes everyone in the cinema laugh, ruining the build up. The other bit is where two cavers are travelling through tunnels filled with water, popping up into little spaces to breath. Excellent, brilliant idea, I’d hate to be in that position, you can feel the vulnerability of the characters. What do they do with it? Nothing.
6. Every single time a monster appears, they are jumping in front of the camera. It just gets boring and isn’t particularly scary. You can only really do this once in a movie, twice at the most. They also spent a little more money on the make up but they ended up showing it in full light, once you see these things really up close, they just look like they’re from Dr Who. Should have kept them a little bit in the dark.
7. Characters whose only point is to die. You get the feeling that the writer wrote a script, realised it was only half an hour long, so added a load of character which he could kill off to fill up the time. In one part, there is a desperately elaborate scene where one guy sacrifices himself for a character, only for that character to get eaten the minute she’s back on the ledge. All the suspense build up, the emotion build up, which made the first one scary, was just forgotten.
8. They brought back the character who got the women lost in the first place, the one that the main character sacrificed in the first one to survive. Very annoying, when you pretty much know there was no way she would have survived. It kind of makes the whole thing seem silly, if she can survive down there with no light, no food, little water and be fine, what are the others all worrying about. Stupid, should have left her in the grave, or at least had her tucked away till the final reel.
9. Annoying and needless scenes of emotion. The good thing about the first one was that they didn’t do that. If my best friend was dead and there were monsters chasing me, I’m getting the fuck outta there, I’m not going to hang around holding her body till it gets cold. Cry later for Christ’s sake.

In short, everything that they had hit on the head with the first one they had totally avoided in the second. The franchise could have had real legs, why not. Now, this one will be a flop, if there is a third one it will be straight to DVD.

Filmmakers, take note.