Neil Marshall’s THE DESCENT was a damn-nigh perfect horror movie : relentlessly intense with well crafted characters and one of the creepiest endings of its kind since Carpenter’s THE THING. In its closing moments, after a bit of cruel false-relief, heroine Shauna MacDonald was revealed to be lost, alone, doomed in the caves where we had spent 90 minutes rooting for her survival. This bleak conclusion was effectively discarded by the American version, which ended on the point of her escape for the sake of commercial appeal. And whichever version you watched and liked, THE DESCENT : PART 2 does the same job of undermining that unforgettably eerie final scene. (The original ending was effectively open enough to allow for this film’s set-up but it still feels a cheat and this film more smoothly follows the U.S. end).

   This heavily contrived sequel takes the ALIENS route and has just as hard a job in its bid to follow a bonafide modern classic. As in the Cameron movie, the original sole survivor is dragged back to the location of where her original nightmare occurred purely because she has knowledge of the enemy that no one else does. Just as in ALIENS, the new team she’s joined with fall victim to the force they haven’t anticipated. In this case, it’s a real leap to swallow that a woman in such a traumatised state would be “persuaded” back down to the caves by the authorities, so soon after nearly perishing and watching all of her friends die horribly. That’s the first barrier to overcome.

   Fans of Neil Marshall’s outstanding original also have to swallow the mid-film discovery that Natalie Mendoza’ character Juno is still alive despite looking very dead when last seen. This softens the harshness of her fate in THE DESCENT for the sake of the kind of corny “closure” Hollywood screenwriters look to bring to a sequel when following a bolder, more ambiguous predecessor.

   As sequels go, it’s efficiently done but typically, fatally unadventurous. Director Jon Harris follows the style and structure of Marshall’s film very closely. David Julyan’s score uses so many of the same cues that you really do sometimes feel like you’re watching the same movie again, especially when PART 2’s survivor girl breaks out of the surface to the same magnificent theme that accompanied MacDonald’s freedom in the original movie. The new team of dead-meat - er, characters, have much less interesting functions in the sequel narrative and form a more conventional horror movie dynamic than the memorable all-girl ensemble of THE DESCENT.

   MacDonald reprises her resilient survivor-girl role to strong effect, though the script gives her only marginally more lines than the shell-shocked Laurie Strode in HALLOWEEN II (the 1981 one). Refreshingly, the flick refuses the usual sequel temptation to reveal unnecessary background information about the terrifying “Crawlers” : we know little more than before save for a graphic scene revealing where they shit.

   Harris proficiently stages the same kind of cliff-hanging, crawler-bludgeoning tensions as before, with attack scenes cut so fast on restless shaki-cam that it’s hard to see what’s going on without access to a slo-mo button. At its best, the film cannily plays on our knowledge of the original’s best scares for the sake of misdirection : the awesome camera viewfinder reveal is here exploited for an effective new shock involving an impromptu Crawler appearance.

   In fairness, the new movie is well paced, as bloody as before, makes good use of those fabulously horrid creatures, and even delivers its own frissons of shock : notably the fate of old-timer Gavan O’Herlihy, who gets simultaneously disembowelled and dismembered while perilously hanging over a precipice. There’s also another grim twist at the very end when we think our new heroine is home and dry. It’s not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination…but it’s main problem is that THE DESCENT was a great one.