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Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
*
Rated on a 4-star
scale
Screening venue: Odeon (Liverpool City Centre)
Released in the UK by Pathé on October 27, 2000; certificate 15; 90
minutes; country of origin USA; aspect ratio 1.85:1
Directed by Joe Berlinger; produced by
Bill Carraro, Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez.
Written by Dick Beebe, Joe Berlinger.
CAST.....
Jeffrey Donovan..... Jeffrey Donovan
Kim Director..... Kim Director
Erica Leerhsen..... Erica Leerhsen
Tristen Skylar..... Tristen Skylar
Stephen Barker Turner..... Stephen Barker Turner
How nostalgic. "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch
2" is a reminder of the heyday of contemporary horror cheese, especially
"Halloween III: Season of the Witch", which did not take place over a season,
contained no witches, and had no relation to the plot or characters of the
other "Halloween" pictures. This movie has no book of shadows, no Blair Witch,
and, come to think of it, no story.
This is a strange situation. The original "Blair
Witch Project", a huge sleeper hit this time last year, was made by two unknown
writer-directors for $35,000 with improvisation and video cameras, from a
screenplay with no dialogue that was shown to the actors in sections -- and
yet it was one of the most cleverly crafted and terrifying movies I've seen.
This sequel was produced by the same people, with a less restrictive budget,
and its director is Joe Berlinger, who made the chilling "Paradise Lost"
documentaries about redneck prejudice leading to miscarriages of justice
in heartland America. But it's incompetent, schizophrenic
trash.
The film takes place in the real world, sort of,
beginning with a five-minute introduction about the phenomenon surrounding
the release of "The Blair Witch Project". Fictional interviews are mixed
with real television coverage; we see critics excitedly discussing the movie,
and fans descending upon its setting, the sleepy little town of Burkittsville,
Maryland. "Get out of our damn woods!" a sheriff shouts to a swarm of kids
picking up souvenir debris. "There is no god damn Blair
Witch!"
Our lead character, Jeff (Jeffrey Donovan), disagrees;
he's a former mental patient turned movie fan and internet capitalist, running
an online store for BWP merchandise and organising a tour of local woods
called 'Blair Witch Hunt'. His customers include a young couple researching
a book about modern mythology (Stephen Turner, Tristen Skylar), an
incense-burning Greenpeace type who claims to be a 'good witch' (Erica Leehrsen),
and a heavily made-up goth girl who's basically just along for the ride (Kim
Director). Following in the footsteps of the original movie, these characters
are named after the actors, but that's kinda pointless this time, isn't it?
The first film was pretending to be real footage; "Book of Shadows" is obviously
an admitted 35mm fiction.
The troupe go into the woods, joke around, get
drunk. The purpose of that in the original was to disarm us with humour and
let us earn care for the characters; the tactic backfires here, because these
folks are oddball idiots who talk pretentious crap. There's a wannabe
intellectual conversation about "Like… isn't myth totally, like, the
same as reality… because, like, isn't what people believe… like,
the truth? Isn't reality, just… totally, like… perception?" Which
is not to say that the characters don't get serious. They remember to point
out such important things as "Totally have some more weed,
dude!"
My favourite snatch of dialogue comes when the
conversation turns to "Blair Witch" itself. One of the most implausible things
about that film, according to Erica, is how two guys and a girl managed to
camp for several days with lots of beer and never get into a sexual situation.
This caused my companion and I to burst into a fit of giggles -- me, her,
and another friend managed to sleep in a tent without fooling around for
four nights in a row at this year's Leeds Festival, after drinking sessions
that went from nine o'clock in the morning until two in the next. When you've
had that much alcohol, trust me, sex is the last thing on your mind, not
that there's much of your mind still working.
You'd expect the characters to have some sort
of expectation that after staying up for two days knocking back booze, they're
gonna fall asleep. After they do, they wake up shocked, screaming "What's
happening? Five hours of our lives have mysteriously vanished!" Uh, huh.
The rest of the movie takes place in Jeff's house, where they try to make
sense of this by sifting through his camcorder footage. They have visions,
things disappear and reappear, there are anomalies on the tapes… everyone
keeps implying that something supernatural is going on, but whenever someone
suggests it explicitly, the others shout the person down, trying to find
a logical explanation.
Stephen is involved in a ridiculous sex scene
scored with the kind of cheap jazz music that was invented for soft-core
porn; Tristen goes mad and starts chasing herself in a circle on top of a
creaking bed; Erica gets accused of being the cause of it all, and responds
by breaking into a fit of tears and hyperventilating over a pack of tarot
cards. In the background are noises reminiscent of light sabers. And there
are meaningless cutaways to a sheriff so hyperactive he belongs in "The
Flintstones", with lines like "I'm gonna gitcha, boy! Thur's bin sum'thin
funny goin' on dain here, goddamit!"
It all ends abruptly, with the group getting blamed
for a series of crimes they didn't commit, because they've been framed by
some unknown supernatural force. The details of this are explained in a montage
during the closing minutes, and we're supposed to be wowed by the revelations,
but whatever power is perpetrating all this evil follows no rules of logic
-- the movie is allowing itself completely arbitrary developments, so there
isn't much point trying to follow them. At least it's short, but it would
have been an hour shorter if the words "dude", "like" and "totally" had been
excised from the screenplay, and every line of dialogue did not repeat the
same point three times over. Sample: "Dude, this is like totally freaking
me out! I'm scared! This is like… scary!"
To be fair, the soundtrack is terrific, and there
is one moment of absolute profundity, when Jeff halts the conversation and
declares: "Wait! This makes no sense!"
COPYRIGHT© 2000 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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