The Descent Part 2

A traumatised woman whose daughter has died, and who is being tortured by nightmares about her previous encounter with the monsters who slaughtered her friends, is forced to revisit their lair with a new and sceptical bunch of hunters - and this time round there's more crawlers to deal with than ever before. But that's enough about James Cameron's Aliens. What's the deal with The Descent: Part 2?

The Descent, you'll remember, was the original 'chicks with picks' flick. There were others - The Cave and, er, that's it. I dunno, you wait forever for a movie about sightless cave monsters relying on sound waves to molest a bunch of explorers, then two scurry along at once. But what The Abyss was to the deeply forgettable Deep Star Six, so Neil Marshall's infinitely superior The Descent is to the aforementioned Lena Headey bomb; an instant modern horror classic, pushing numerous primal buttons to do with claustrophobia, fears of the dark, and gore. Lots of lovely gore. More gore than Lesley Gore. Gorier than Vidal. It was also much praised at the time for featuring supposedly realistic female characters (by genre standards, at least), even if those women truthfully seemed about as believable as a bunch of pals in a Pringles commercial. Just the fact that a director whose previous film featured absurdly over-the-top alpha-males had made a so-called 'women's horror', the yin to Dog Soldiers' yang, was something to make a noise about.

The Descent would gain even darker (if unwanted) currency when a London double decker bus carrying a promotional banner for the film was ripped apart by a suicide bomb on 7 July 2005, killing 13 people. Amid the twisted metal of the No.30, the poster tagline survived, mockingly intact: "Outright terror". But above all else, the most important factor in the Descent's fortunes was that it was a British film that cleaned up, big time. Although the movie had been predicated on a UK based business model, nobody had foreseen just how astoundingly well it was going to perform overseas. Given its returns, then, this sequel was utterly inevitable. As inevitable, in fact, as Neil Marshall taking an exec producer's role and tossing the directorial baton to somebody else. In this case, former Eden Lake editor Jon Harris.

"Everybody be kind to Jon," urged a heavily-pregnant Shauna Macdonald, somewhat embarrassingly, from the stage at Film4 FrightFest 2009, where The Descent: Part 2 had its UK premiere. "He may not be Neil Marshall - but he may be even better." Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves, eh. But you know what? Shauna might just be onto something. Because amazingly enough, this is one of those very rare and special occasions when a horror sequel (scratch that - any movie sequel) doesn't totally and utterly suck. Surely reason alone to raise a glass of Cava or two.

It ends as it did before, with a woman's arm clawing its way out of a woodland pit. And admittedly, it's a familiar retread through that ancient Appalachian cave system. (And yes, pretty much a thematic retread of Aliens too, with much attendant mother-and-daughter subtexts.) This time round, frazzled Sarah Carter (Macdonald) is helping the authorities with their inquiries: that's Gavan O'Herlihy's grizzled idiot, Sheriff Vaines ("My gun stays with me"), and Deputy Rios (Krysten Cummings), who've discovered fellow caver Juno's blood type on Sarah's clothes and are slightly sceptical about her tales of blind, albino Trogs. Aiding the trio are climbing specialists Greg (Joshua Dallas), Cath (Anna Skellern) and Dan (Douglas Hodge); and yep, the first Trog-treat might as well have a target tattooed on their forehead, with the logo "Me First" in the centre.

Along the way there are rats, Trog poo, ropes of drool, a big surprise, and more gore than you can shake a gnawed leg bone at. Never mind Aeneid and Enoch Powell's "Tiber foaming with much blood": you want carnage? This movie has oceans of haemoglobin, and geysers of guts. As in the original, the interplay of light and shade is also handled very effectively. A German language website reviewing this film describes Shauna's "pretty face scattered with summer rungs", a lovely phrase which may have lost something in the translation, but you know exactly what they mean. On the downside, characterisation and dialogue have predictably taken a battering ("There's a mountain full of caves and fuck all time"), and some fans of the original are going to be annoyed that this sticks so safely and slavishly to the tried and tested formula.

That said, this should in no way embarrass or hamstring a first-time director. It delivers the goods as they say. A third film is surely on the cards, no doubt in 3D. But in order to retain any good will, this series is going to have to do the one thing our Crawler friends have demonstrably failed to do. Evolve.