The sequel takes place right after the last film, with Sarah running for her life out of the Appalachian cave system. Remember, in the U.S. release of The Descent, Sarah got out — she was saved, not doomed to live trapped by her own insanity inside the depths of the cave, food for the Crawlers, as in the U.K. ending. But her memory is now gone and the cops are forcing her back into the darkness to find her buddies, naturally.

Here are a few clips from the sequel, which comes out in the USA December 4th:

Hospital:

Getting Ready

Down Under

Cave In

As you can see, Sarah is out — but sadly, her memory and sanity are both badly damaged. Local authorities pick her up, and right away want to know why shes drenched in the blood of her friends. With her memory gone, the cops think it's best to send the crazy lady back down into the cave, with a new team, to find out exactly what happened. And of course the Crawlers get another buffet course of human flesh. The Descent 2 has been opening up in festivals across the US, and overseas.

Star Trek's Nero:

Why He Failed: Sure he was loud, and maybe a tad intimidating - but his anger only made him volatile and pissy, not really frightening. His rage was easy to deter, and even easier to circumvent - once you brought a level headed hero into play (which, granted, took some time). Bottom line: He was all bark and not enough personal bite. Sure, he blew up Vulcan, but we didn't really see the destruction. It was just reckless and wild - once again, something that seems easy to deter with a cooler head. He didn't even take delight in watching Captain Pike squirm. If Nero reappeared via a rift in time, I don't think people would honestly be that worried. It would be all "oh it's that guy again, what's that he's out of red matter, oh well then no worries." Khan, he is not.

Also, there is nothing scary about this:

What Should Have Happened: The unbridled hatred should have been used both in a big way and in a small way. So he can't blow up Earth, fine then he's going down there to kill off little innocent humans one by one. Or he's sending in secret troops to slaughter the new recruits at Star Fleet. He should have channeled his rage in many different ways besides merely blowing up a planet. It would have made a case for a far more convincing and frightening character and seemed less like a drunken bar brawl.

Transformers 2's The Fallen:

Why He Failed: This baddie's menace was lost in the folds of transforming robots. By the time he was on Earth, I didn't really know what his abilities were, in comparison to all the other Transformers. Also he made Megatron look like a total wuss-bot, after he was set up as a pretty scary baddie in the first movie. What was with the kneeling and my master talk, Lame.

What Should Have Happened: He should have killed Optimus Prime as opposed to "gathering strength" on the far side of some moon. Also they should have made an attempt to explain just why this particular early Transformer was so especially scary. You could also argue that this movie shouldn't have been made — period — or The Fallen should have kept back to the third movie, to let the Constructicons take the lead. The Devastator was vaguely threatening for the minutes he was sucking down sand.

Watchman's Ozymandius:

Why He Failed: This character was doomed from the start mainly due to the way he was written (and what was left out) and the role's casting. Sadly, Matthew Goode just couldn't pull off golden haired Adonis, we deserved better.

What Should Have Happened: They shouldn't have tampered with the ending. Zack Snyder left just about everything else in there — why futz with the scariest parts of the film? Snyder never should have let Hayter use 9/11 to cut the destruction and violence out of a book that is destructive and violent for a reason. Leave in the sea of blood that fell upon New York. His part should have been beefed up — poor Ozzy was dreadfully underwritten, and also recasting might have helped a bit.

Skynet (T4 Terminators):

Why They Failed: These robotic buffoons didn't make a single logical decision, from start to finish. We know Skynet and the Terminators are ruthless, they'll leave your mean step-uncle dangling by the neck on their spiked hands until they carelessly flick him off. And yet they can't think far enough ahead so they can maybe, just maybe pit more than one Terminator against THE John Connor, when they are sitting on top of a freakin' Terminator factory.

What Should Have Happened: We could go on — and we have. Basically, they needed menace. They needed to feel cold and uncaring. Maybe if they'd slaughtered floppy-headed little kid in front of Kyle Reese, that would have helped. But really, their idiotic bungling always undercut their actions. A complete rewrite is needed front to back.

Sadly while these bad guys continue to ruin of a supervillain upturn, our future is not looking too bright.

Further Failures:

Whiplash

Sure, Iron Man villains are supposed to be the eviliest evil people of all time, but this is not really helping the case. Whiplash doesn't quite leave me speeches and begging for mercy, not even with those highlights.

Cobra Commander and Destro
While I'm cautiously optimistic about Destro, nothing good will come of a Cobra Commander who looks like this. We've seen further evidence to back up the tremendous fail awaiting our Commander in the GI Joe flick, there's nothing scary about about silver scuba gear with a bit of pipping sticking out the side.

Us

In both Distict 9 and Avatar the human beings are the bad guys, yet again. While I'm excited for these two films, learning a valuable lesson about the human species doesn't really send shudders down my spine.

But fear not —we're holding out hope for the pasty white cave/bat people from space and the Appalachian Mountains to save us. Enter the white demons from Pandorum and The Descent 2. Sure they are similar, but they both give me the heebie jeebies and seem to want only one thing: to confuse you, and then kill you. I'm desperate for some good old fashioned killing, and I have a feeling these guys will deliver.

From the trailer it looks like we're dealing with the standard, "your hero is bonkers and no one believes her" problem, but in Descent 2 it appears as if Sarah Carter doesn't remember the crawlers, which would explain why they hell she would ever let anyone talk her into going back down in that hole to "find" her friends.

Neil Marshall's The Descent is by far and away one of my favorite horror flicks of the 00s. So please, I beg of you, handle this sequel in a respectful manner. I can accept the fact that perhaps somehow Juno managed to keep herself alive (it's a good twist), but I swear if they take any more liberties with the plot, I'm going to go nutso. I've already had to sacrifice the all-female cast for the sequel and I'm not ready to make any further compromises.

But director Jon Harris gets major points for paying homage to the jump-out-of-your-pants moment from the first by finding the girls' old camcorder. There is no US release date for this flick yet.

The new Descent sequel takes place right where the original left off with main character Sarah escaping the caves and making her way to civilization, where she is hospitalized. Released afterwards, she joins a rescue team and jumps back into the cave to save whatever survivors are left over. And of course, things go terribly wrong.

Shock Till You Drop visited the Descent 2 set and got an ear full of the best new details on this horror sequel. James Watkins, one of the Descent 2 writers, explained how this movie could be scarier and gorier than the first:

I honestly feel that this film is going to be more violent that the first. I got a skewed sense of things as I'm shooting second unit, I'm shooting all the close-up gore with Paul Hyett's prosthetics. He is a legend, he did my film Eden Lake, he does all Neil's films. So I've been doing close-ups of prosthetics... Gore is pretty straight forward and pretty simple. I think with a really strong horror movie you have to get into the core, it's much more powerful. You have to put gore in there, to give moments for people to cheer about - and there's a ton of that - but if it was just that then it's not enough.

The best scene from The Descent is when the main character Sarah gets wedged between the rocks and has a panic attack - a claustrophobia scare at its best. In the sequel, the crew is trying to recreate that kind of chest-pounding experience, but in water:

Crawlers' heads and somebody getting out a drill and drilling them. For us you have all that fun stuff, but at the same time what I felt was good about the first film was the way in which Neil tapped into the real deep horrors of claustrophobia, abandonment, fear of the dark, the terrifying sequence for me was when Sarah gets stuck and she has her panic attack. For me that's much scarier than any monster stuff. The sequence that Jon and I came up with to top that is to do it with water. Jon and I went on a little trip to Yorkshire and went down a cave with some cave rescue guys and we didn't get very deep at all. It's pretty dangerous. The real extreme cavers do the water stuff. Going into the water not knowing where you're going to come out, I wouldn't even want to do that on the fantastic set Simon has built. For me this is a stand out moment in the film, tapping into really deep primal fears.

Most importantly for fans of the first movie, Juno - the character that Sarah abandoned in the bottom of the dark and creepy cave- is back. According to Shock, the actress who plays Juno, Natalie Jackson Mendoza, is on set and back in action. Please, please, please have her gone stark raving mad with fear, or even better, gone native and become the leader of the Crawlers.

[Shock Till You Drop]

The Avengers:

Could the Hulk be the villain of the Avengers movie? Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier thinks so. Just look at Ed Norton's green-eyed evil grin at the end of the Hulk film — he's someone who could potentially enjoy his mayhem a little too much. [Comics2Film]

Wanted:

Here's a new clip from Wanted that cropped up on Entertainment Weekly, involving Angelina Jolie in a giant train crash. [Entertainment Weekly via Comic Book Resources]

Transformers 2:

Want to know what happens in Transformers 2? Do you not care if what you're reading has any conceivable relationship to the truth? Then check out this allegedly leaked treatment for the Transformers sequel, which is probably a fake. In a nutshell, Sam goes to NYU and gets drawn into the world of street racing. And Megatron gets resurrected thanks to Soundwave's "mystic healing" harmonizing his particles. It turns out that Las Vegas' glittery lights were powered by the Allspark, and there's still enough stored Allspark-energy to power Vegas for generations — but the Decepticons and Starscream are coming to claim Vegas' power source for themselves. There's a massive battle for Las Vegas, and specifically the Luxor casino, which is the gateway to the remaining Allspark energy. The U.S. Army tries to trigger an EMP, but fails, and Vegas is trashed. And Sam's girlfriend Mikaela is killed. The movie ends on a downer note, with our heroes in disarray until the third movie... but Mikaela miraculously comes back to life at the last moment. [Scribd via CobaltSS]

G.I. Joe:

UGO has one of its patented spoiler round-ups for the G.I. Joe movie, and this time there's a fair bit of info we haven't reported, maybe because we weren't covering this movie much until recently. The main villains are Destro and Baroness, with Cobra Commander as a shadowy manipulator behind the scenes. Cobra Commander is played by Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, and it's rumored he's General Hawk's best friend and a former G.I. Joe who fell from grace. (He and Hawk went on a mission to stop Destro, and Cobra Commander was scarred horribly and turned evil, the way people do when their faces get scarred.)

The rivalry between the two ninjas, Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes, forms the heart of the movie — it's rumored they studied with the same sensei and fought for two days without landing a single blade. But Snake Eyes made a mistake and was deafeated, so he went to Brazil and learned a new weapons-free discipline. The evil organization Cobra enlists the aid of the mercenaries known as Dreadnoks, led by Zartan and his brother and sister, Zarana and Zandar. Zandar has the ability to change his skin color to blend in with his surroundings. There's more at the link. [UGO]

The Descent 2:

Here's the first look at the Crawlers from The Descent 2, in which a traumatized Sarah emerges from the caves covered with blood. The police force her to go back into the caves to help them look for her five missing friends, but she starts having flashbacks and remembering more of the horror she endured there, as the group gets closer and closer to getting trapped in the dark with those monsters. [Fangoria]

Battlestar Galactica:

In the remaining 11 Battlestar Galactica episodes, airing next year, we'll see the relationship between Bill Adama and Laura Roslin deepen. And we may get more of a sense that Laura has been grooming Lee Adama as her successor all along, despite their disputes. And Roslin actor Mary McDonnell definitely seems to think they just found Earth. In the rest of the season, she says, "whatever has been complicated becomes more so." [Zap2It]

We haven't seen the real reactions of our characters to their discovery in last Friday's episode yet. "Revelations" and the next episode fit together closely, like a two-parter, and they're meant to be seen a week apart, says writer Jane Espenson. [TV Squad]

Lost:

Actor Cynthia Watros (Libby) accidentally refers to her Lost character as Annie. Was this a slip of the tongue... or did she let slip something by accident? And apparently we may see more of Libby at some point, and have some of our lingering questions answered. [Spoilers Lost]

Heroes:

It turns out Claire isn't the only character on Heroes who's adopted. And the discovery of another adopted character will change... everything! We'll see more of Monica and Nana Dawson (Nichelle Nichols) in episodes focusing on their relationship with Micah. But we probably won't see any more of Claire's beau West. [E! Online]

Chuck:

In the fourth episode of Chuck's second season, an old high-school friend of Sarah's named Heather shows up at the Orange Orange, Sarah's new job. And Heather blurts out Sarah's real name, shocking Chuck, who has fun almost blowing Sarah's cover and finds out more about Sarah's background. Heather is married to another high-school classmate of Sarah's, a nerd who turns out to be more than he seems when Chuck meets him and "flashes" on him.

So Sarah and Chuck have to go undercover at Sarah's high-school reunion, to foil the sales of high-tech bombs to evil Russians. Chuck manages to look like a hero while Casey fumes, and Sarah confronts her high-school demons. Meanwhile, Lester teaches the nerds at Buy More about "friendly negotiations" with customers, with unexpected results. [Chuck TV]

The Middleman:

Says Middleman star Matt Keeslar of upcoming episodes:

We have a Peruvian flying pike that, when it injects its venom into a victim, the victim turns into a trout-craving zombie. We have several different aliens from different planets. From one planet they happen to look like people on Earth who have had a lot of plastic surgery. From another planet they're a boy band. From another planet they embody a 14-year-old. And then there are, of course, other more fantasy-type characters, like an ancient terra cotta warrior who comes back to life to find and bring the heir to the Xing Dynasty to the underworld.

Just a wild guess, but I think he meant Qing Dynasty, not Xing. [Comic Book Resources]

The new Descent sequel takes place right where the original left off: main character Sarah escapes the caves and makes her way to civilization where she is hospitalized. The local police convince her to show them where the cave is so they can search for survivors and the cave people, and of course things go wrong. Here's to Juno joining up with the cave gang, blinding herself with a pick, and leading her crew of albino cave people on a vengeance campaign against Sarah.

Empire Magazine spoke with MyAnna Buring (Sam) from the original Descent and she verified the cast's reunion.

"We're all back, all the girls have made an appearance" we were told by Buring. "I don't know if I'm supposed to tell you this, but we'll all appear in flashbacks. We had that video camera in the first film, remember, so [it's footage from that]. It was last week that we all rocked up on set in Ealing Studios and they'd mocked up these sets that looked like where we'd shot in the first film...so I went back to being Sam for a day".

While I'm ridiculously excited for the return of the ceiling crawling, raw-flesh-eating cave people, this idea is tragically flawed on two important counts. First, the original UK release of The Descent seemed to imply that Sarah was trapped in the caves forever and had gone completely insane, but the re-cut American ending had Sarah escaping, only to be accosted by the ghost of Juno. So if were going with the original ending, there's no way our main character could have gotten out off that ledge. And if we're following the American version, well then we have to deal with ghosts, to which I say no thanks. Second, it would be a cold day in hell before you ever got a survivor of that whole cave mess back underground and into the same cave they came from. Who cares if one of her buddies is stuck down there? I thought that was her intent to let the cheating, backstabbing frenemy die a slow and painful death in the dark? So nuts to the idea that Sarah would go back for Juno's sake. Plus it kind of ruins the whole character of Sarah because who wasn't standing up in their seat cheering when Sarah took a pick axe to Juno's knee leaving her wounded and behind. It completely negates my love for this character, especially if she's dumb enough to go back underground.

[Empire]