Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Review Tuesday: THE DESCENT (2005), THE DESCENT: PART 2 (2009)

 Silence of the Descent - Posterwire.com
THE DESCENT
A group of thrill-seekers chose the wrong caves to explore. 
For the longest time when Mrs. Bax0jayz would go search for something to see on movie night she always skipped over this movie. 

It starts off with a handful of girls on a white water rafting excursion. Almost immediately afterward there is a huge care accident, killing the husband and daughter of Sarah Shauna MacDonald). Fast forward a year later, Sarah's friends want to try to get her mind off of things by going on their annual thrill-seeking expedition. This time, spelunking the Appalachians in North Carolina. Six women descend into this cave system looking for adventure. 

And they found it. Apparently, Juno (Natalie Mendoza) wanted to crank up the excitement by selecting an uncharted cave system. Oh, and no one knows where they were heading, so if anything goes south, no one would come looking for them. Of course, things DID go south.The get lost, then run into a tribe of troglodytes that adapted perfectly for life in the darkness of cave life. The crawlers, as they are referred to, are almost bat-like, but in a humanoid form. And they are angry, ruthless, and VERY hungry. The girls are hunted down one by one and eventually Sarah escapes, alone. 
 
This movie is AMAZING.It played on my natural claustrophobia, as well as what I don't know that might be in the darkness.The pace was perfect, and it developed levels of anxiety to the point I found my pulse was racing.A very original and worthwhile horror film to watch! 
 
 
 The Descent 2 Blu-ray | Zavvi
THE DESCENT:
PART 2
Sarah returns to the caves with a search party
After seeing the first movie we decided we had to see the sequel. I mean, how was this even going to work? Sarah saw her friends getting massacred by the monsters; why on earth would she return? It's pointless! Isn't it? 

After the events of the first movie, Sarah is found by a tow truck driver. How she got there and where her car(s) were was not explained. But she is brought in to the hospital covered in the blood of all her friends and no memory of ANYTHING. Meanwhile there is a big search and rescue mission to find the girls because, as it turns out, Juno happen to be the daughter of a senator. So Sheriff Vaines (Gavan O'Herlihy) and Deputy Rios (Krysten Cummings) drag Sarah back to where a police dog tracked a scent. Along with a team of three search and rescue spelunkers, the six descend into a different part of the cave system. 

Once again, the darkness and claustrophobia get to work on your nerves right away. The route they took into the system got them to the action much sooner, so things started going sideways much faster.

I liked this sequel, too, but there were a lot more problems with this installment. The tough-guy sheriff was immediately unlikable and did stupid things. It made you wonder how he managed to survive at this job with such terrible instincts. The skills the rescue team had going into this mission didn't seem to help them in the least, as they were all dispatched pretty quickly and close together. Somehow Juno was still running around alive in the caves. Who knows how she was able to evade the crawlers especially when we saw her last she was facing down a small army of them. The special effects seemed to take a bit of a dive in this film. The very effective blood from the first movie was gone, replaced with Chef Boyardee tomato sauce. An odd inconsistency was that the creatures were nimble in the first movie, they also seemed fragile as they seemed almost too easy to dispatch. As if their bones were made of some lighter material than our own. In this one, they were substantially tougher and harder to kill. The you have the ending. The girls found an exit which was clearly NOT the same exit Sarah had used mere hours earlier. Rios was the only one to escape. She runs out and hides. No and and nothing around her. She pulled out her cell phone only to be clocked with a shovel by the man who showed them the path down, Ed Oswald (Michael J Reynolds). He then dragged her back to the opening for the crawlers to have.  

In the last five minutes there were more problems for me to overlook. Since Rios came out through a different opening than Sarah, how did Ed know where to expect them to emerge? And where the hell was he hiding from Rios? The trees were all slender! Just before the girls were about to make their escape, a large hulking crawler came in dragging a big ole elk or a moose or some large four legged mammal like that. Yet the opening was barely big enough for Rios to fit through. 
 
In all, this sequel was okay. I feel like the writing and direction got a little lazy with this film. It's still worth watching if you want to see more of those awful monsters. 
  

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