The Descent: Part 2 - Page 2

The trailer. Judging from this thread, I'm not the only one seeing it that way.

Drat, I thought you actually saw it.

Sounded like it. Goddamned Internet.

Nope. I gather that there wasn't even a definitive final script treatment, much less filmed.

I love Marshall but of his three films I may be alone in thinking The Descent was his weakest - and that was with the proper ending. Until this thread, I didn't even know the US release ended differently (hell the original ending was one of the films main saving graces).

I have zero interest in a sequel Marshall had fuckall to do with.

Now Dog Soldiers 2, on the other hand...

Didn't Marshall do some 2nd unit shooting for the sequel?

I didn't have a problem with this trailer. Sold me on watching it.

I dont know what to think of it after seeing Juno still alive.

The Descent stands or falls on which cut you see. Its original ending is one of the most paradoxically uplifting I've seen. The re-cut has had all the emotional impact leeched from it.

The cave creatures are a red-herring. The real demons are the ones that exist in the heroine's mind. The cave system functions as the classic Gothic labyrinth. A psychological maze that must be negotiated in order for the occupant to conquer - in this case - grief. In the final scene she does exactly that (and looks upon her dead child's face for the first time since the accident) and finds peace.

One of the best horror films I've watched in years. The sequel has a very tough act to follow.

I disagree. She's not looking at her child (literally or figuratively). She's pretending her child is still alive.
I'm one of the few who liked the american ending. The image of her rising from underground is a great symbol of her ascending from her trauma. The final image of Juno is now the new guilt she has to live with.

I saw the child scene as doomed resignation. I haven't seen it in a while, but on the pan out in the original ending, don't we hear the creatures shrieking? If I'm remembering it correctly, that would seriously undercut any attempt to make the final scene uplifting.

Yes. Which is why I used the word paradoxically.

Throughout the movie we see cuts of her daughter's birthday and the child carrying(?) the cake. On each occasion the heroine erupts in screams before she sees her daughter's face. She is crippled with grief. It is only when she chooses to overcome her grief (instead of letting it eat her slowly) that she can see her child's face again.

Right, and the important thing is that in that moment she doesn't care that there are creatures about. We care, and we assume she'll die soon, but that's sort of outside the story's scope. It was more about getting over the grief than it was about winning a fight against cave beasts. At least that's how I saw it.

Whichever way you read the original ending (for the record, I agree with Geoff) I'm amazed that anyone could prefer the recut. Replacing that looming sense of dread with a cheap jump-scare is the absolute worst way to end a horror movie. I'm pretty confused as to why they even did it in the first place... Was it to leave open the possibilty of a sequel?

Sorta kinda. The cave beasts were obviously a symbol of her grief. How they are both dealt with is intertwined. That's what muddles the birthday cake ending for me.

Didn't Marshall have one of those creatures peering out from a doorway in the opening hospital scene and cut it? I looked briefly once and didn't find anything.

They're certainly more than red herrings.

Geoff's reading is interesting, especially considering that the original ending includes Mom's escape fantasy prior to the cake scene. The escape fantasy ends with Juno's ghost showing up in the passenger seat of her car, implying that Mom would rather die in the caves (and be reunited with her daughter) than be saddled with the guilt of murder. Is this paradoxically uplifting? That's more subjective. I will add that I much prefer the cake scene ending to the American one.

Red herrings with big teeth, then. Look, it's a question of perspective: To a mother - what could possibly be more traumatic than surviving the violent death of a firstborn?

Hence:

"What are you afraid of ... what are you so afraid of? The worst thing that could have happened to you has already happened".

I think Bob's reading is interesting, but I certainly never took away that Sarah has any guilt about hobbling Juno and leaving her to the creatures. Juno did bad things pre-cave (betrayed their friendship by sleeping with he husband and then abandoning her during the grieving process) and once in the cave - where she got them fucked in the first place and then mistakenly dealt out that throat wound and then left her victim to die. I think Sarah's pick action at the end was certainly cathartic. It'll be interesting to see what they do with that relationship in the new flick, though I certainly wish they never made a sequel. Anyway, love the actual ending. Can do without the other.

Even in your own reading, if the cave is the crucible through which Mom is able to conquer her grief, then the Monsters are an integral part of this crucible, and in addition to their superficial importance in the narrative, they're physical manifestations of Mom's grief. "Red Herring" implies that the story is intentionally diverting you toward them as an irrelevant topic. The Descent is certainly about more than monsters in much the same way that Body Snatchers is about more than aliens, but neither use monsters as Red Herrings.

No. I didn't say that. There is no evidence to suggest they aren't real. With the original hospital scene - that's a different story. But as stated, I'm sure Marshall cut it. And with good reason. Very few people can stomach a it's-all-a-dream-fooled-you! movie.

It's not intentional, no. So poor choice of words. But they are sapless next to the demons that inhabit the mind of the heroine.

Oh, no, I wasn't implying anything about them being real or not. They're obviously real.

They represent her demons. Accordingly, how she conquers/escapes/succumbs to them symbolizes how she deals with her personal tragedy.

They are certainly representative. I would have liked to have seen this underlined with a bit more mirroring. Marshall dips his toes in the water with the female beastie that loses its mate and seeks revenge, but then withdraws them again. I guess the temperature was too cold ...

But it's a minor nitpick.

I think the creature was meant to be chasing her down the corridor as the lights go off. But Marshall cut it i think he said something about it in one of the commentaries).

So this was just a shameless rehash. There's some decent builing of tension in the first half of the movie, before it completely deflates as it goes on, and I don't think it really has an original idea in it's head. Juno's return is handled horribly, and it's that point where the movie totally lost me. Not recommended.

They don't do anything interesting with the monsters or introduce any new elements besides military (as "new" as that could be for a part 2)?

Nope- sadly lacking in creativity. The monsters are the same, and there's really no military involvement at all.

The best thing that can be said for Descent 2 is that it gets better as it goes along. It starts off in a confused, unfocused fashion. It's also terribly stupid (the movie can't even bother to make up a reason to take Sarah back into the caves that isn't laughable). But the monster action's fine and the third act sort of works, if only because we're following the leads we liked in the first one.

It doesn't change the fact the whole film is pointless, though. Its only reason for existing seems to be so that (BIG SPOILER!) Sarah and Juno can apologize to each other before dying. You know, again. But for realz this time. (END SPOILER)

Yeah, it's a whole pile of stupid, from dragging Sarah back to the cave immediately, to Juno becoming an action heroine in spite of having a pick shoved through her knee a being left to die a couple of days before, to pretty much everything. I think the first half is better directed as far as builing tension goes, but the monster stuff gets boring pretty quick.

You mean it's not...

I hope the ending to this one brings up as much of a discussion as the first.....

Movie was fairly terrible though. I could have care less about the characters and it didn't use the darkness nearly as well as the first. A few scenes of decent gore kept it from being a complete loss.

Is it "debut as a SyFy Original" bad or just in comparison to part 1?

... as I add it to my queue regardless...

I'm sad to say that I was pretty disappointed in this. I really wanted to like it, after all, the DESCENT is one of my top five favorite horror films ever. However it does very few things well and alot of things wrong.

First off, they made a major blunder on the plot. It was simply absurd to find out that Juno was a Senators daughter (sorry, but here in America senator's daughters are white) and the idea that they'd send a traumatized woman into after two days is just crazy. I think maybe having her return to the cave after a number of years would have worked better. She could have been goaded to go back by a television crew (MAN VS WILD style) who offered her a chance to prove her story that had been dismissed as a lie.

Or do it in another cave! The cool part about cave dwelling animals is that often those species are found in one cave and one cave only. You could have a common ancestor that got trapped in different caves, and in each one the evolutionary result would be different because of the unique survival needs of the different caves

Anyway, there were a handful of good moments but it managed to capture virtually none of the dread of the first and in fact kind of ruined the caves in a way by making them full of different exits. The first was so effective because you really worried that the characters were trapped beneath the ground forever. Caves can run for THOUSANDS of miles, so the idea that in DESCENT 2 it was so easy to pop in and out of the death cave came as a huge disappointment. At first I rolled my eyes at the idea that a mine was sitting on top of the lost cave, but the art direction in the mine was pretty good and the place look appropriately old and cramped as to be really unsettling. You could picture those 19th century miners crawling around deep below in the dark scratching out tunnels barely tall enough to stand up in... however there was not enough mine before they got to the cave. You should have gotten the feeling that the depths the miners were digging to were completely insane and that the mine was made far too deep. Instead it seems kind of like it would have been hard to avoid breaking through into the cave system

Plus, the murderous hillbilly ending was so dumb that it's hard to look at it as anything other than a joke. I still have no clue why he'd do that.

PS Am I right that THE SECOND DESCENT is a better title by leaps and bounds?

DE2CENT

Haha. In all seriousness though, what do you think about my proposed title?

DESCENT 2: DEEP PENETRATION
DESCENT 2: GOIN' DOWN
DESCENT 2: VAGINA INNUENDO

Oh for fuck's sake. You're utterly amazing, did you know that? In a carnie retard kind of way of course.

Have you looked at the ethnic make up of the senate lately? Is Juno related to Roland Burris or Mel Martinez?


Plus, it was totally absurd for that revelation to come out of left field like that. If she had been written to be the daughter of a united states senator someone would have mentioned it in the first film. Like: "You're a senators daughter! Won't someone send a rescue party after us, Juno?"

DESCENT 2: SPELUNK HARDER

Some of those are pretty funny, but I'm not sure a lewd subtitle would do the film any favors at the box office, DARK MITE 8.

My proposed title*, on the other hand, is rather evocative IMHO

*THE SECOND DESCENT

Ugh just saw it tonight, horrible. It's basically a remake of the first film only with characters you either don't like or don't care about. Seeing Juno again was cool except the part where they ended up killing her and Sarah...again. Unclear why there needed to be a sequal beyond the money to be made. And to make just extra horrible they add in the hillbilly.

The ending is a damn joke, and probably the biggest groaner since the finale of Halloween 5.

More disappointing in comparison to Part 1, but it's a bad movie on it's own terms as well.

That's where the movie totally lost me, that she would still be alive is a nonsense.

Man that bums me out it sucked, oh well should of guess because most horror movie sequels blow.

I found this to be a fine diversion. The set-up is fucking LUDICROUS but once the film gets going I liked it. It's nowhere near as good as the original, but I found it to be well made on it's own terms. And I actually liked some of the new characters (specifically the Aussie babe who gets stuck) But yeah, the set-up...it's like they weren't even trying.

But the ending.....you couldn't have liked that. I mean in a way it makes sense given the creastures have poor eye sight in the day time and the guy feeds them. But why not kill Sarah the first time she escaped the cave? He found her first and there was no one else around.

Yeah, it was bad, but by that point I was in 'roll with the horror movie' mode, because if you're in 'this movie makes no fucking sense and I can't enjoy whatever it has to offer' mode you aren't going to make it past the first 20 minutes.

It doesn't make sense. It's lame. Ohh, he winks to the cop early on, so the ending is justified? Give me a break.

Trust me, I can roll with twist endings and such. Hell, I love Haute Tension's ending even.

This ending though is just of the lazy "We'll figure it out later..." sort.

Rented this last week, and found it to be worth the Redbox dollar. It's a basic retread of the first movie, but Gavan O'Herlihy makes it watchable. The gore is pretty good too. The twist at the end is a total head scratcher, but from what I've read, they're already working on a third one, and that lady cop is going to show up again. I'm curious to see how they explain that old man. As was said a few posts above, he helped out Shauna MacDonald at the beginning, but feeds the lady cop back to them? Yeah, strange.