A sequel to the surprise hit horror movie of 2007. The original was a tight thriller that focused on a group of adventuring women who get trapped while spellunking only to then have to fight off cannibal underground dwellers (aka Crawlers).
The story: two days after the first movie, the survivor Susan is found wandering and covered in blood. Unable to explain what has happened, she is forced to go back into the caves to find her missing companions only to have the rescuers encounter the Crawlers.
Was it good?
No.
And that's a shame because while I didn't *love* the first one the way some people did (I know people who put it on their 10 best of the year lists), I thought it did a lot of really good things. Unfortunately this one did wrong everything the first movie did right.
The original starts with a group of adventuring women. Then one of them gets into a car accident where her husband is killed and she, well, goes nuts. A year later the girls are trying to reform their gang and so they go on this special cave exploring (off the map so it will be more special) and then they get trapped after a cave in, forcing them to push deeper into the caves. Then they encounter the Crawlers and have to fight for their lives.
Now one thing this does well is that it spends a good amount of time with the women. In fact we don't even get to the Crawlers until the middle of the film. Now I know a lot of people think you have to get to your story fast fast fast, but spending the first part of the story on characters, getting to know the girls, makes the audience want to root for them to survive, as opposed to most movies where the people are basically chum. It also did a great job giving us the claustrophobia of being trapped in the caves. Then the monsters were cool and they did a great job only giving us these glimpses -- enough where we knew what they were, but not so much that they started to feel familiar.
The sequel, however, did none of that. They dive into the story with a new group of explorers, but none of them had any emotion to them, and even the main girl, Susan, was basically just trauma girl. Then one in the caves, there was no claustrophobia. In fact, it was the largest, best lit cave formation I have ever seen. And lastly, they showed the Crawlers a lot and they just stopped being scary. Where as the first movie worked because everything had an emotional element -- the girl going nuts, the group breaking apart, wanting to get back together, getting trapped and turning on each other and then the attacks -- and just kept building and building, this movie felt almost random. Or if not random, then paint by numbers, like each kill was happening at regular intervals just because that's the way you're supposed to do it not because it made any sense for the story or emotion.
In other words, they took a cool original movie and made the sequel feel generic.
*** AVOID ***
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