I have quite a bit of faith in you, dear readers, that you very quickly understood that this movie is a sequel to The Descent (2005). The original was about a group of female spelunkers who became trapped exploring a cave, and if that wasn’t enough, they ran into a few freaky albino blind cave dwellers who began trying to eat them. It was a lot of fun and was a breath of fresh air as far as horror movies were concerned, and I would definitely put it on my list of best horror movies of the past decade.

Believe it or not, this film includes blood AND females screaming.

One reason the original was so successful was due the the controversy over the change in the ending for American audiences so it would be less bleak. The original release, in the UK,  shows the main character hallucinating her escape from the cave, but in reality, the creatures descend upon her as the movie fades to black and credits roll. In the release for the US, she actually did escape, and the movie fades to black, not really showing what happens to her afterwards. Lots of people were upset with the new ending, but without it, this sequel wouldn’t exist. I don’t necessarily prefer one ending to another, but I think it’s bullshit when a studio will change the idea for the creators ending to appeal to a wider audience (i.e. Paranormal Activity).

Bet you didn’t know Paris Hilton was under that makeup, did you?

This film picks up where the US ending left off. The main character finds her way to safety and is brought to a hospital, but is being questioned about what happened to all of her other friends. Due to the insanity that took place in the caves, she is practically catatonic, but somehow manages to agree to join a search party to go look for her friends. When they get down to the caves, she flips back into survival insanity mode, and does everything she can to avoid being killed by the monsters. Most characters die along the way (big surprise) and the ending has a fun twist to it that I don’t want to give away so you can fully enjoy it.

Did I mention the scene where the female spelunker gets into the creature freak jelly donut supply!? Let’s just say that hilarity ensues!

I have to admit, this film looked almost exactly the same as the original. There was a distinct grainy quality to both films, as well as certain color filters to either emphasize reds or blues to create the desired effect. Had you not known it was a different director, you might not have even noticed. One big difference is that the director of this definitely ran out of ideas on how to show violence and gore, so he used three effects repeatedly ad nauseum.  One of those things involved blood either coming out of or going into someones mouth. I get it, blood in the mouth is gross, especially someone else’s blood, but does it really happen THAT often? Is there something about this cave that has a oral fixation? Another thing repeatedly done was the fact that any time something was stabbed, there was an immediate close up of the object being stabbed into an ambiguous part of the body. Whether it be a drill, a bobby pin, feather, or a tampon, it always was shown as a close up of the object going into some form of gray flesh, and then blood spurting out. I feel like maybe the director’s brother got hired to do special effects, and all of those effects were filmed in his garage and he kept picking up whatever he found, stabbed something gray, and made blood spurt out. Then the director felt bad because maybe his brother is retarded or ugly, and didn’t have the heart to tell him how it really only needed to happen once. Thirdly, this film made me think that if you live underground long enough, your skull will become as fragile as a ping pong ball, which certainly is a drawback. I mean, if you happen to be tall and bump your head on a rock? Forget it, you’re BOOM roasted. These women in the cave just kept on crushing skulls and making brains pop out. I don’t think I ever saw myself complaining about too many brains exploding in movies, so this is a first. And come to think of it, I take that back, I would pay good money to watch “The Descent 2: That One Head Exploding Scene From Scanners For 90 Minutes”.

Wolfman Moon Scale