It seemed appropriate to go see a scary movie on Halloween, so that’s what I did. The movie was Paranormal Activity 2, which is kind of a misnomer as it isn’t a sequel. It’s actually a prequel, so I guess it should really be called Paranormal Activity 0.5 or something like that. In any case, I did enjoy the film and I do recommend it…cautiously, and I’ll try to explain why as we go along.
WARNING: There will be some minor spoilers in here, but I won’t ruin the entire movie for you.
I saw The Descent in theaters back in 2006, and I remember liking it quite a bit. I liked it because it did exactly what a horror movie is supposed to do. Horror seems to exist today as little more than a reverse action movie, where you cheer for the bad guy instead of the good guy, often because the so-called “victims” are really a bunch of assholes who deserve what’s coming to them (see: Roth, Eli). This wasn’t the case with The Descent. You actually felt sympathy for the characters, and you experienced the same fear and claustrophobia that they did. It was also one of the few films that legitimately made me jump. The moment when they first encounter one of the “crawlers” face-to-face came out of nowhere and totally caught me off guard. That’s not easy to do. Most horror films of today aren’t really designed to be scary, and when they do attempt to scare the audience, you can usually see the scare coming a mile away and it loses its effectiveness. With The Descent, of course I knew the crawler would show up eventually, but I didn’t know when. When it finally did show up, it did so at an unpredictable moment and it scared the shit out of me. Even my friend that I saw the film with jumped at that moment, and she’s a horror fanatic who is probably as desensitized to the “jump scare” as one can get. As far as horror films go, it was very well done.
I was quite surprised when I found out that a direct-to-DVD sequel had been released. (Technically it was released in theaters, but not on this side of the Atlantic.) I never thought for a moment that The Descent needed a sequel. It was fine on its own. But I decided to check it out. I was quite certain that it would not live up to the original. What surprised me was just how inferior it was. The ending especially tarnished it…but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning. It’s a very good place to start, or so I’ve been told.
Cinematic Excrement 