The Descent: Part 2

Elegiac and poignant are not adjectives one expects to read in a review for a horror film, but the sequel to Neil Marshall's brilliant 2005 horror film The Descent does something interesting in playing off the events of the first film in order to evoke these emotions. Sure the film is a fun, often flawed Friday-night horror flick, but it's also trying to be something more than that – and even though there's not quite the same amount of character development as the original to give weight to the peril and mayhem the characters go through – for a 90 minute sequel director Jon Harris should be given some credit for almost making the film a success. There are pay-offs in the film that don't work, repetitive set pieces, and an ending that is atrociously bad; however, warts and all, The Descent: Part 2 is still a visceral experience that outdoes anything we've seen from the genre since Marshall's original film, and it even slows down for a few moments so that the story can compound on the sadness from the first film, all culminating in making this sequel a better horror experience than its straight-to-DVD American release would suggest.


The film picks up where the first one ended (well kind of, this film asks us to disregard the ambiguity and sadness of the first film's final moments) with Sarah (Shauna McDonald reprising her role) showing up on the roadside in the Appalachian Mountains and kick-starting a search and rescue mission to find her missing friends. There's your plot, your entry point into what is essentially a rehash of the first film with a few intriguing ideas that never get fleshed out. The idea for a sequel as first seemed asinine to me, but what Harris does with the film is interesting enough – especially when considering the possibilities of a police investigation of what happened, briefly taking the film out of the context of horror – but it never builds on that interesting premise and instead jumps head first into your typical horror film where a search and rescue group and Sarah head back into the cave to find her friends. Okay, but what about the set-up? We know that bad things will happen to these people when they get down there, so why should I care about them dying? What are their relationships to one another?

These kinds of questions get tossed aside in the name of rehashing all of the same weird-things-happen-in-the-cave type stuff from the first one, but they happen without the weight of actually caring about the characters. When the characters are in peril, or need to be left behind because they're trapped in some rocks, or lose their way from the group, the film slows down within the moment to give us the touching musical score (from the first film, which was quite good) and remind us that we should feel sad right now, but something feels amiss since we don't quite have the background we need to care about these characters.

Another interesting idea the film only kind of broaches is whether or not Sarah is insane after her experience. When the group first gets down in the cave Sarah is silent (for obvious reasons since the "crawlers" hunt on sound) and takes on some of the physical characteristics of the "crawlers" (the first death scene is a doozy) . Was it all in her head? Did she in fact think that the calcium deposits in the cave where the "crawlers"? Again, all kind-of interesting questions that are never fully explicated in the film because it's more interested in being a visceral entertainment, instead of trying to be both like the first film.

Aesthetically the film is repetitive and therefore not very interesting to look at (even though it's not bad to look at except for the oft phony looking cave set) and lacks the innovative and interesting horror allusions Marshall littered his original film with. However, there are some intriguing moments in the film like when two members of the rescue party scale the cave by leaning back-to-back so that the "crawlers" don't get them, and as they get out through a crevice they happen upon one of the previous spelunkers who tried to get across from one side to the other (this leads to an inspired fight scene). There's also a moment when the search and rescue team happen upon one of the previous film's most nightmarish locations and find the video camera that Sarah used. As they watch the footage of the dead girls before getting to the footage shot in the cave the viewer is reminded of the Picnic at Hanging Rock poignancy set up in the original film where you have these beautiful women who – to the outside world – have disappeared mysteriously. The scene is shot in a way – with Sarah, who has run off from the search and rescue party, slouching behind a rock listening to the voices of her dead friends ring out from the camera – that reminds the viewer of why the first film worked so damn well at evoking more than just fear and dread and horror. This moment of the film is what causes me to open this review with words like poignant and elegiac because as we go back into the cave with Sarah we can't help but be reminded of the loss of her friends.

There is, however, one plot development that fans of the first film will no doubt roll their eyes at (SPOILER) and almost brings the last part of the movie to a screeching halt: Juno is still alive. Yes, the woman Sarah left for dead and we too assumed was done for as she was surrounded by "crawlers" helps save the day in the sequel. I can imagine if fans of the original gathered to watch this in a theater there would be a collective "ugh" in the crowd. Harris does a good enough job of showing Juno to be more like a "crawler" than human when we first see her, but again…I want to know what this suggests: how did she survive? Is she a cannibal now? Is she sane? What does her survival suggest about Sarah? Again, Harris abandons these more intriguing plot threads in order to keep the brusque pace of the film going, and I can't help but think that this film could have been so much more than just a sequel.

Despite these disappointments with the story, and a final bit of punctuation that is all kinds of stupid (and doesn't befit the mood the original established), The Descent: Part 2 is as good a horror film that's been released since the original. That's more of a damning claim on the genre as a whole than the film, but nevertheless it's worth checking out for its visceral appeal and its gushy, squishy gore effects and extreme violence – which by the way director Harris definitely was a Fulci fan as we get a drill through the head a la City of the Living Dead and a pick-ax through the mouth a la The House by the Cemetery – and intriguing enough story threads to keep fans of the original happy enough during the film's economic running time. The acting and the character development aren't nearly as good as the original, but I don't think Harris was interested in making a sequel that aspired to be more than what we get (he certainly isn't trying to recapture the magic of Marshall's film), and for that I can't hate on this sequel too much. Fans of the film should see it, though, as I was pleasantly surprised that despite erasing all of the ambiguity of the first film, The Descent: Part 2 didn't frustrate the hell out of me.

DVD Review: Doomsday

Watching Neil Marshall’s Doomsday is like watching a loved one make mistake after mistake – you know what they’re capable of and the good they can create, but really because you care about them so much you have to just sit and watch them fail, because it’s for the better. Doomsday encapsulates this feeling; a pastiche of post-apocalyptic /80’s action films, Marshall pays homage, or, let’s just call it like it is – apery, to films like Escape From New York, Mad Max, Aliens, and even modern video games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil; however, the only way in which Marshall’s film succeeds is in making the viewer wish they were watching the source material that Marshall borrows from. All I can say is that I hope the failings of this film will provide Marshall with an adequate “what not to do” list for his next picture.

One of Marshall's homages -- the silhoutted infected

reminded me of the above pic from Lamberto Bava's Demons

The film opens with a virus infecting Scotland. A wall is built on the border of Scotland and England in order to isolate the infected. Evil shenanigans ensure from politicians who seek to kill off the entire city and then claim there is a cure at just the right moment. Of course, as we know with films like this, anytime that Marshal Law is declared things go haywire rather quickly.

We are introduced to the main character Eden Sinclair (great name) when she is a little girl. Her mom is trying to get her across the wall so that she will be safe. As the riot ensues (caused by the chaos of Marshal Law) shots are fired and one of the bullets strikes Eden in the eye. Her mom does indeed find her a ride out of the chaos, but Eden is left with only a letter with a return address as evidence that her mother existed. She flies off and we learn about the history of the virus and how it died off.

Flash forward many years (or as Marshall puts it “2036 NOW”) as a much older, sexier Eden dons an eye-patch (like Snake from Escape From New York, just one of thousands of John Carpenter references) and a gun, and we see that she and her partner are infiltrating a slave operation. This gives Marshall the opportunity to make references to James Cameron action films and show lots of blood. There’s even a nod to Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond with one of the nastiest looking shotgun deaths I’ve ever seen. We learn that Eden is cold and dethatched, even after her partners’ death all she cares about is that they got the job done. Word comes across the wire to her boss (the always great Bob Hoskins) about the big bad virus coming back and how they think they find a cure for it….so naturally Eden is a perfect fit for a top secret operation that involves taking a team of troops into the no man’s land in order to find Dr. Kane (Malcom McDowell) who may know about the cure.

There’s your story. Along the way we get oodles of references to Aliens (rag-tag group of military who all specialize in something, and spout off quirky lines under stress; also there is a scene, a great scene, where they search Kane’s laboratory and it evokes the great scene in Aliens where they find Newt), Mad Max, and the other aforementioned films. However, it’s about this point in the film (about 40 mins. in) that Doomsday lost me. Once the Mad Max stuff started happening and you had the torture and the psycho-punk, post-apocalyptic junk involving anarchy and cannibalism, I was just ready for the film to move forward. I don’t care how bloody or wink wink Marshall’s film is, it just wasn’t interesting.

Seriously, the entire ending is filmmed like this --nothing more than a car commercial. I half expecting to hear Jeff Bridges tell me about "the open road..."

Not only did I not dig the Mad Max stuff, but that’s only part of the film! When they escape from these psycho punk rockers the film turns into Lord of the Rings (seriously) and then turns into a weird mix between Army of Darkness, Gladiator, and George Romero’s Knightriders. You see, because the government neglected the other side of the wall, evolution took over as history repeated itself and it became survival of the fittest. Therefore you have a dystopian society with the Mad Max portion of the film, and then a call back to the medieval days with the second half of the film. This is where Eden and her crew (down to just three people now, per horror film standards about the dead weight getting knocked off, think Aliens again) find Dr. Kane as he is ruler of his “kingdom”. It’s just a strange, strange moment and I never got into it. From here the film takes another bizarre u-turn as Eden finds that Kane has been hording all sorts of goodies in an abandoned mine – these goodies include cell phones and a really nice car….after that the film goes back to the Mad Max portion while simultaneously turning into a car commercial – Marshall even films it so.

The film is a mess, and it’s a damn shame too because I love Marshall. Doomsday’s sum is never quite as good as its parts, as I was constantly entertained or enthralled, but I just didn’t give a crap about it. You see, that’s the difference between this Marshall film and his masterpiece The Descent, which was also art through imitation. The difference being that The Descent had characters and situations involving their past that we cared about. With Doomsday Marshall completely abandons the reasoning why Eden would be so inclined to go on a suicide mission, and really, only is it at the end that they call back to the fact that she constantly sought her mother’s home and to know who she was.

Many people give Quentin Tarantino a hard time because they believe he doesn’t do anything different in his films than what Marshall does with Doomsday, but I would disagree, as again, you can look no further than Marshall’s previous film and see the same style on display in Doomsday, just with more substance to it. Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a review for the New York Times when the film was released, and really his final line of the review best encapsulates what’s so wrong with Marshall’s film:

In terms of story, “The Descent” and “Doomsday” are as different as two genre films can be, but the falloff in artistic quality is still quantifiable. Where “The Descent” was a slow, quiet, exquisitely modulated, startlingly original film, “Doomsday” is frenetic, loud, wildly imprecise and so derivative that it doesn’t so much seem to reference its antecedents as try on their famous images like a child playing dress-up. Homage without innovation isn’t homage, it’s karaoke.

So it’s a missed opportunity. As I said it’s an entertaining movie, but really it never goes beyond that. It’s a gore fest and gore hounds will be satisfied, but there’s no context for the gore, so really we just see fake heads rolling around on display and excruciatingly long chase scenes that never end all because Marshall had a budget, and used every last cent of it. And that rock score, my God it thumps and bumps and blares throughout, never ceasing, not even for a quick reprieve, and really, I guess that’s a good metaphor for how this film plays. Marshall just seemed overwhelmed with all the goodies at his disposal, and it reminded me of the carefree, kitchen sink style of filmmaking displayed by Sam Raimi in the third Spider-Man film. I’m glad Marshall had fun, and I’m glad he has the budget now to do what he wants. It was a nice vacation, but it’s time for Mr. Marshall to get back to work.