The Descent Part 2

You may remember the first movie in this series, The Descent, coming out in 2006 to moderate success. I don't catch many horror movies, but I thought the original was awesome. To spoil the entire plot, a group of six women accidentally go caving in a completely uncharted cave, get split up, stumble upon a ferocious species of cave creatures, and get killed off one-by-one until the last one manages to crawl her way back to the surface, still dealing with the mental anguish of all the horror she has experienced. The Descent Part 2 was released in 2009 to little fanfare, and though I heard about it, I figured it would probably be terrible and didn't bother looking into it until last night on Netflix. To my surprise, for most of the movie I was enthralled, I thought it worked great as a sequel. Basically mere hours after lone-survivor Sarah has escaped from the cave, the police find her covered in blood and unable to recount what happened to her and her friends. Suspecting the worst, two cops force her to join in a search for her friends in the cave along with three expert cavers. Honestly, the premise here was pretty flimsy, but merely works as an excuse to get Sarah back in the cave pretty quickly after she escaped. The set-up isn't perfect, but it wasn't really in the first movie either. By also giving us a variety of characters, it was much more easy to keep track of what's going on. I found this way too hard to do in the first movie- six nondescript women who you can barely see (they're in a cave after all) running around made it hard to tell just who was still alive and who wasn't. Throwing a few men in there, and having some different ethnicities made it a little easier to get a handle on who's who, although it kinda does away with the feminist themes the first movie was praised for. Anyway once you get our group of six down in the cave, the movie was full of just as much tension as the first, and loaded with scares. Sure, a few times they pull the "a friend surprisingly grabs another's shoulder with a screech sound effect" for a cheap scare, but for the most part the movie was pretty creative about it. Unlike the first movie, the cave monsters are introduced rather early. Also unlike the first movie where the best scares came from the claustrophobia of being potentially buried alive, making the late reveal of the monsters a bit unneeded, the cave and the monsters both share an equal part of the plot in Part 2. The crew stumbles upon corpses, goes crazy, gets trapped, back-stabs, and basically does everything else that made the first movie great. Seriously, it might not be quite the same eerie movie the first one was, but if you go in expecting a little more action and not looking for some great plot (it's a movie about cave-monsters, for chrissakes. I'm looking at you, everyone on the internet who sperged about how this "ruined" the first one) then you'll at least have some fun with Part 2.

Ok, that would be my entire post if not for one thing- the completely terrible and non-sensical ending. Just like in the first movie, one person eventually makes it out of the caves and stumbles upon a new problem (dealing with the horrible things she's done in the first, still being completely lost and disoriented in the middle of the woods in the second). Awesome ending, right? Well hold on, there's still 20 seconds left. For some reason a minor character from the start of the movie shows up, whacks the lone survivor upside the head with a shovel, then drags the unconscious body back to the hole they crawled out of, presumably to feed the cave monsters. Huh? I've looked around on the internet for ANY sort of explanation for this, and everyone else is just as perplexed as I am. Apparently a part 3 is in the works, but if it has to do with some guy bringing corpses for the creatures to eat, then yeah I'm probably gonna pass.