It's not just that most of your regular shows are on holiday break this week; the rest of programming is also affected by marathons and special programming that you'd probably be better off avoiding.

Monday, for example? There's really not much to be looked for at all. Fasten your grump-belts: You're going to run into a lot of that this week.

Tuesday

It's not SF, but Dirty Jobs is at least weird enough to occasionally seem like urban fantasy, right? For those who don't believe me, Discovery is running a marathon of the show from 12pm through 12am to convince you otherwise. For fans of Robin Williams' later work, AMC has Jumanji at 1:45pm.

(Edit: There's also a new episode of Better Off Ted on ABC at 9pm, which I highly recommend and would've earlier if I hadn't accidentally thought it was a rerun. Sorry!)

Wednesday

We're still a couple of days before the holiday itself, but that doesn't mean anything to a time lord, which explains why BBC America has two Doctor Who Christmas Specials already: "The Christmas Invasion" (David Tennant's first episode) at 12pm, and "The Runaway Bride" (Catherine Tate's first episode!) an hour later.

Thursday

Dear Syfy, I know it gets a lot of viewers, but a Ghost Hunters marathon for Christmas Eve? Unless they're looking for the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, I'm not a big fan (8am through 5am the following morning). Just watch BBC America's rerun of Doctor Who's "The Next Doctor" (5pm) instead.

Friday

Dear Syfy, Twilight Zone from 8am, then some trashy movies (Monster Ark at 9:30am, Copperhead at 11:30, Ghost Town at 1:30pm and Stephen King's Desperation - sadly, not a film about the desperation of a horror writer with a face like a shaved lion - at 3:30) before Serenity at 6:30, Total Recall at 9pm and Star Trek: The Next Generation from 11:30 through until 4:30am on Saturday? You're forgiven for that Ghost Hunters thing.

And for those who'd rather watch something with a little more (admittedly dubious) educational value, Discovery has a Mythbusters marathon from 12pm until 6am the next day.

Maybe you shouldn't watch the whole thing.

Saturday

Awake post-festive revelry and wondering if there are old SF B-movies to stave off sleep? AMC has you covered, with a triple-bill of The War Of The Worlds (3:30am), The Day The World Ended (5:30am) and Earth Vs. The Spider (7:15am).

Alternately, Syfy has a horrorfest happening, starting with Stay Alive at 9am, Rest Stop at 10:30, The Descent at 12:30, Autopsy at 2:30, then the first three Saw movies (4:30, 6pm and 9pm, respectively) to scare you out of any post-Christmas Day bluster.

Of course, anyone who isn't watching Doctor Who: The End Of Time part one on BBC America at 9pm should consider themselves (a) not in America, (b) someone who may have watced it online the night before, but we won't talk about that or (c) not our friends. Sorry, it's just the way it is (For those concerned: It's an unedited version, at 1hr and 15mins, including commercials).

Sunday

Catch up with the first four episodes of weird, quasi-animation Outer Space Astronauts on Syfy at 9:30am and then just throw away the remote; the same channel has In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale at 11:30am, followed by Beyond Sherwood Forest (Monsters! Robin Hood! Together!) at 2pm and Dragon Wars at 4, before Men In Black II (at 6pm) and Nic Cage's "What if Indiana Jones was happening today and shit?" National Treasure at 8. What better way to end the week than with Cage, after all?

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.

So, before I really get into it, just read the synopsis:

Distraught, confused, and half-wild with fear, Sarah Carter emerges alone from the Appalachian cave system where she encountered unspeakable terrors. Unable to plausibly explain to the authorities what happened - or why she's covered in her friends' blood - Sarah is forced back to the subterranean depths to help locate her five missing companions.

As the rescue party drives deeper into uncharted caverns, nightmarish visions of the recent past begin to haunt Sarah and she starts to realize the full horror and futility of the mission. Subjected to the suspicion and mistrust of the group and confronted once more by the inbred, feral and savagely ruthless Crawlers, Sarah must draw on all her inner reserves of strength and courage in a desperate final struggle for deliverance and redemption.

Any excuse for a rematch with the Crawlers seems like a good idea, but the premise pushes logic beyond its breaking point. Basically, if the local authorities suspected Sarah of murdering all her (very active and healthy) besties in a cave, there is no way in hell they'd take her down there again. Plus let's not even touch on the subject that she's on a verge of a mental collapse — so let's plunge her in darkness again... Like this won't backfire.

The logic-defying film comes out the 14th of October.

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.

The Descent 2 will be screening at London's Fright Fest, and if you're in the area, you should definitely go. I haven't seen it yet, but if it's anything like the original (even though it has a new director) it will be fantastic. I've gone through two DVDs of the original, and it's still never getting old. Also, I think we all know who is still alive in that cave, and I cannot wait to see her face off, crazy-pants style, with bats-o Sarah.

Terror mounts as fear cuts deeper in the chilling continuation to the globally successful horror hit THE DESCENT. Dazed, confused and traumatized, Sarah Carter emerges alone from the cave system where she confronted frightening enemies: herself and her darkest dread. With no rational explanation to what exactly happened or why she's covered in blood, the authorities force her back into the subterranean depths to help locate her five missing girlfriends. But as the rescue party enters further uncharted domains, flashbacks start haunting Sarah as shocking memories of the recent past hideously hit home. Only she realizes the full horror of their futile mission. And only she knows what lurks to trap them in the eerie shadows of the labyrinthine warrens. For they are venturing into the habitat of a new tribe of Crawlers, inbred, deformed and even more viciously feral than Sarah faced before in the black recesses of her worst nightmares.

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.

Studio photographer Ollie Upton has just uploaded a whole mess of great new photos from the set of The Descent: Part 2, which picks up right after Neil Marshall's scary-as-hell monster movie. Here's the official synopsis:

Terror mounts and fear runs deeper in the chilling continuation to Neil Marshall's award-winning and critically acclaimed modern horror classic, The Descent. Distraught, confused and half-wild with fear, Sarah Carter emerges alone from the Appalachian cave system where she encountered unspeakable terrors. Unable to plausibly explain to the authorities what happened - or why she's covered in her friends' blood - Sarah is forced back to the subterranean depths to help locate her five missing companions. As the rescue party drives deeper into uncharted caverns, nightmarish visions of the recent past begin to haunt Sarah and she starts to realize the full horror and futility of the mission. Subjected to the suspicion and mistrust of the group and confronted once more by the inbred, feral and savagely ruthless Crawlers, Sarah must draw on all her inner reserves of strength and courage in a desperate final struggle for deliverance and redemption.

The UK is getting a May 15th release of the sequel, but there is still no word about the US release. I need to see this movie, especially when Sarah runs back into you-know-who with a search and rescue party — come on, you know that creep is still down there.

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 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]

They're called Homo hadalis. Get it? They're from Hades, "the planet within their planet," as Long calls it - where their refers to the military men who now find themselves confused by this brand new enemy that confronts them from below.

Soon enough, finding more and more of these literally hellish non-humans pouring up from the bowels of the Earth, killing thousands before disappearing again into unlit caverns, the militaries of every nation in the world plan a subterranean invasion. Armed with machine guns, hydroponic agriculture, UV lights, and lots of instant concrete, they head downward. They begin the descent.

Indeed, organized and state-funded, the militaries "approached the subplanet the way America approached manned landings on the moon forty years ago, as a mission requiring life support systems, modes of transportation and access, and logistics."

Vast caverns are mapped. Tunnels stretching clear across the Pacific seafloor are discovered - and, from there, cobwebs of subsidiary tunnels, weaving off into an abyss:

The abyss beneath the Pacific is basalt, which gets attacked every few hundred years by huge plumes of hydrogen-sulfide brine, or sulfuric acid, which snakes up from deeper layers. This acid brine eats through the basalt like worms through an apple. We now believe there may be as many as six million miles of naturally occurring cavities in the rock beneath the Pacific, at an average depth of 6,100 fathoms.

As one of Long's characters says:

"Where it goes, we're not quite sure... A profusion of tunnels shoots throughout the Asian plate systems, giving access to the basements of Australia, the Indonesian archipelago, China, and so on. You name it, there are doorways to the surface everywhere."

Soon the Army Corps of Engineers gets involved. "They were tasked to reinforce tunnels, devise new transport systems, drill shafts, build elevators, bore channels, and erect whole camps underground. They even paved parking lots - three thousand feet beneath the surface. Roadways were constructed through the mouths of caves."

It takes days at a time to get anywhere; people move between underground base camps and vast instant cities further on, full of klieg lights, ringed with landmines, thriving behind walls of sandbags and fortified machine gun nests. There are outbreaks of "tropical cave disease" and claustrophobia - and there is something else down there, that enemy twin of the human race.

Everywhere the descending soldiers find "evidence of primitive occupation at the deeper levels," down amidst overwhelming pressures beneath continents and beneath the sea.

Of course, surface-dwellers want to explore; they want to see where the tunnels lead, to go out to the edges of the Earth by going into the Earth. "Into Hell?" some characters innocently ask. No, not Hell: into "an upper lithospheric environment," we read. "An abyssal region riddled with holes."

Suddenly, man no longer looked out to the stars. Astronomers fell from grace. It became a time to look inward.

There is a rich vein of subterranean adventure in science fiction, from Jules Verne, of course, to Neil Marshall's recent horror film The Descent and the unwatchably bad The Core - or even the Bible, where we read about the harrowing of Hell, which the Catholic Encyclopedia describes as a "triumphant descent" into the planetary abyss.

I'm tempted to quote Nietzsche. After all, with all this talk of entering into unexplored realms of pressure and darkness, looking into a void that perhaps looks into us in turn, the obvious final question is: Are we prepared for what we'll find?

As Jules Verne himself wrote: "Look down well! You must take a lesson in abysses."