BLAIR WITCH 2: BOOK OF SHADOWS
Rated R - Running Time: 1:30 - Released 10/27/00
Last year's quasi-documentary horror film The
Blair Witch Project received generally good notices because
of its novel approach and clever marketing strategy, but was disliked
by many horror fans because of its lack of blood, violence, music,
plot, effects, production values, or a visible villain. Although
I loved the film, I'll readily admit that after one showing the
cover is blown and it's pretty much useless except for academic
purposes, but no one can deny that it broke new ground and inspired
an unprecedented amount of water-cooler discourse. It also proved
extremely cost-effective, given that its expenses only totaled
about 100 bucks plus gas.
There is absolutely no doubt, however, that Blair Witch
2: Book Of Shadows is an uninspired attempt to capitalize
on the previous movie's success. Lacking anything to distinguish
it from any other run-of-the-mill teenage horror flick, BW2
is nothing but a transparent grab for cash on the part of producers
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez (the co-writers and -directors
of BWP), who didn't even bother to contribute creatively
to this one. Although this film attempts to parody its own opportunism
with jokes about people making money off the original film's hype,
no amount of self-deprecating humor can change the fact that Myrick
and Sánchez have besmirched their good names with their
sloppy avarice. And the film isn't even remotely effective. There's
an early scene where one character is trying to act spooky and
another says, "Jeff... nobody's scared." How true it
is.
Written by Joe Berlinger and Dick Beebe and directed by Berlinger,
Book Of Shadows (which, by the way, has nothing to do with
a book, nor with shadows) departs from the revolutionary, unscripted
style of its predecessor and returns to the standard low-budget
horror formula. It centers around five thrill-seeking Blair
Witch Project fans who go camping at the site near Burkittsville,
MD, where the original movie was filmed in order to see the "witch"
for themselves. Of course, anyone who has seen BWP knows
that it was all fiction, so this premise shows questionable logic
from the start.
The camping trip is hosted by Jeffrey Donovan, a profiteer
and former mental patient who sells bogus Blair Witch merchandise
on the Internet. His tourists are a pair of lovers expecting a
baby (Tristen Skylar and Stephen Turner), a beer-guzzling, psychic
goth girl with an attitude (Kim Director), and a modern-day witch,
or "wiccan" (Erica Leerhsen), who feels that witches
have gotten a bad rap. After a night in the woods, partying, drinking,
and videotaping to their hearts' delight, the campers return to
Jeff's home and weird things start happening: they discover gaps
in their video footage, their video footage contains scenes of
them doing things they don't remember doing, and then they all
begin to have hallucinations. Sounds like a simple case of bad
mushrooms, but their assumption is that they absorbed some sort
of witchy energy from the forest. There are murders, and then
more murders, and finally a miasma of badly-edited interrogation
footage brings the film to a non-descript conclusion.
Myrick and Sánchez should have left their 1999 creation alone to be ascribed to the pantheon of groundbreaking films and moved on to other projects. But they have already learned the Hollowwood tradition of overexploitation, and they will continue to suckle at the dry, withered breast of the Blair Witch until their original creation is sullied beyond recognition: BW3 is scheduled for release next summer. If they're not careful, they may find their careers burned at the stake. *