News|Movies|BD & DVD|Writings|Other

Saturday, March 20, 2010

BD impressions: The Descent: Part 2

8:45 PM / BD Impressions / 1 Comment

What do you do when you're sitting on the rights to one of the best horror movies - scratch that, THE best horror movie - of the last decade? Answer: you make a shameless cash-in that lifts the core elements of the original but none of the heart. THE DESCENT: PART 2 has no reason to exist (other than the obvious financial one). The story had already been told and finished at exactly the right point. Still, I approached the sequel prepared to give it every possible chance, only for it to disappoint me at nearly every turn. Oh, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of tomato ketchup and a handful of really exciting set-pieces (my favourite involves one character trapped after a rockfall and a crawler scrabbling around outside trying to get in), but it just feels completely empty and, by the time the climax comes along and lifts the original's denouement shot for shot, so lazy as to be objectionable.

The director, Jon Harris (who edited the first film), and his three writers seem to be under the impression that all that's necessary to recapture the success of the original is to get a bunch of characters together and send them into the caves to face the crawlers as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, they seem to have missed the fact that what made THE DESCENT such a great film was not just that it was tense, claustrophobic and bloody, but that the six women we followed in that movie were all realistic and vividly drawn. Writer/director Neil Marshall gave them each distinctive personalities but avoided turning them into clichés by relying more on their interplay than on stock traits. Yeah, we got that Holly was the reckless one, Beth was the sensible one, etc., but there was a lot more to them than that, which became abundantly clear when the proverbial hit the fan. In addition to the returning heroine, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) - the writers actually trot out the dreaded "amnesia" plot mechanic in order to justify having her return to the caves she just escaped from - THE DESCENT: PART 2 gives us five new characters, and the best I can say about them is that each one dies well. They're either dull and uninteresting (the cave rescue leader ehose sole defining characteristic is that he's Australian) or constructed out of the most hackneyed clichés (the impulsive, bone-headed county sheriff who seems to be doing his best to get everyone killed) and as a result it's difficult to give a damn about them. At no point could I remember any of their names, and the only way I could keep track of them was to give them each nicknames based on their nationality or general appearance - names like Kylie Minogue and Father Christmas (yes, I'm mature). And if you don't care about the characters, the tension quickly dissipates and you're left with nothing more than a collection of set-pieces involving meat puppets meating grisly demise after grisly demise. Even the claustrophobic feel of the original is in short supply, thanks in no small part to the inclusion of the heavily built sheriff, who for some reason is able to traverse with ease the same tunnels that a bunch of svelte women struggled to squeeze through in the original.

As Sarah, Macdonald does her best and at times does a very impressive job of portraying someone whose emotions have been ripped out, leaving nothing but an empty shell, but some of the dialogue she has to stumble through is clunky in the extreme, and her performance suffers accordingly on those occasions. The new additions are okay, giving perfectly acceptable performances, but none of them are memorable in any way. Ultimately, though, the biggest problem is that there's simply nothing new here. It's just a cash-in in every possible sense, and whenever Harris repeats footage from the original, or has the new characters encounter the bodies or video footage of the previous cast, you're only reminded all the more of how much better that film was. Perhaps most jarringly, the sequel seems to lift David Julyan's score from the original wholesale, playing the exact same music at the exact same plot points and leaving you with the feeling that what you're watching is nothing more than a soulless carbon copy of a much better film. Which, on the whole, is precisely what THE DESCENT: PART 2 is.

Oh, and it contains a shit gag (and both interpretations of that phrase are equally valid). An actual, honest to God, river of poo. With two of our heroines submerged in it. Played for laughs.

Image quality: The quality of the video presentation doesn't plunge to quite the same degree as that of the film itself, but it's hard to look at THE DESCENT: PART 2 side by side with its predecessor (well, discounting the US MPEG-2 "silent" reissue) and not be disappointed. It's not bad, it's just "meh". The back cover of this French release from Pathé (which, in case you're wondering, features English audio and removable French subtitles) claims an AVC encode on a BD-50, but in reality we get a VC-1 encode on a BD-25. In terms of its overall mediocrity, it reminds me a great deal of many a Warner disc... and guess who owns the US rights? I don't want to point fingers at who might be responsible for the encode, but bearing in mind that I can think of only one major studio still using VC-1 on a regular basis... I think I'll stop right there and let the pictures speaks for themselves. 7/10

The Descent: Part 2
studio: Pathé; country: France; region code: B; codec: VC-1;
file size: 16.6 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 25.42 Mbit/sec

For comparison, Icon's excellent Australian release of the original film (scroll past the US Lions Gate disc, although it too looks much better than THE DESCENT: PART 2).

1 Comment

 
To combat spam, commenting is automatically disabled on entries older than 30 days.

Did a comment you tried to post accidentally get eaten by the spam filter? It happens from time to time. I get upwards of 200 spam comments every day and unfortunately don't have the time to weed through all of them in case something genuine ended up there by mistake. If one of your posts gets incorrectly flagged as spam, email me at whiggles[at]ntlworld[dot]com and I'll do my best to retrieve it.