The Descent: Part 2: more a rant than a review
"The Descent: Part 2" begins about 5 minutes after "The Descent" finishes. Or, to be more precise, after the US cut of "The Descent" finishes. Sarah has made it out of the cave, was found by a trucker and brought to a hospital where she is now quizzed by the police, who are very interested in where the other girls are. The problem is that the events of the first film have scrambled Sarah's memory so much that she doesn't even remember her daughter and husband died a year ago, leave alone what happened to the other cave-explorers.
So the local Sheriff decides to start a second mission into the caves and take Sarah with. Less than 24 hours after she has just gotten out of the goddamn caves and while she is most likely still exhausted, freaked out and, let us not forget this, a suspect for multiple murder.
Let us just pause here for a second and consider the sheer idiocy of this idea.
Have you considered it? Then you have an approximate idea about the quality of "The Descent: Part 2".
The film's story does exactly one interesting thing, pretty much towards the end in fact, something which makes you go "Oh, hang on, I see, oh cool, that should be interesting."
And then it finishes.
Everything up to this point, however, is best described as "painfully generic". People are in caves, there are monsters, the people try not to get killed by them. There are a few okay scares on the way and the budget for blood and dismemberment is decent-sized, but the film has nothing of the grimness or emotional subtext of its predecessor. Or character development. It's not even that big on logic (Or maybe I should just think less about the likely sensory capabilities of fictional creatures). The most exciting thing to be said is that one character's actions are so terrifyingly dumb that every second the scriptwriter allows him to breathe afterwards should constitute a small miracle to anybody versed in the normal dynamics of such films. Clearly somebody has a lot of Hero Points to burn. No, really. Quite amazing.
Please, somebody kill him!
In summary: "The Descent" (UK cut) did not need a sequel and it sure as fuck did not need this one.
As a standalone film it is.... well, generic but adequate, I guess. Maybe it would be okay as part of a whole night of DVDs.
*sigh*