Book
of Shadows:
Blair Witch 2 |
DIRECTOR
Joe Berlinger
SCREENWRITERS
Dick Beebe
Joe Berlinger
PRODUCER
Bill Carraro
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Nancy Schreiber
MUSIC
Carter Burwell
EDITOR
Sarah Flack
CAST
Kim Director (Kim)
Jeffrey Donovan (Jeffrey)
Erica Leerhsen (Erica)
Tristine Skyler (Tristan)
Stephen Barker Turner (Stephen)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 90m
U.S. release: October 27, 2000
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
See also:
- The
Blair Witch Project
|
For
all its flaws -- and there are many -- Book of Shadows,
the quickie sequel to 1999's runaway indie hit The
Blair Witch Project, has one key element in common with
its predecessor: the gut-wrenching horror of people arguing with
each other, on and on, pointlessly. (In my more fanciful moments,
I suspect that the real secret of the first Blair Witch's
success was that it was an ooh-spooky version of The Jerry
Springer Show, all yammering confrontation without meaning.)
This sequel, which pretends the first Blair Witch was
a fiction film that could have been based in fact, follows
five twentysomethings into the barren woods of Burkittsville,
where they mysteriously lose several hours of their lives. They
wake up the next morning remembering nothing, though they know
something has happened; the video cameras positioned all
around their camp have caught teasing glimpses of this something,
but meanwhile the quintet occupy a lot of screen time quarreling
over what the footage means.
Not much, as it turns out. Book of Shadows is meant to
be a metaphysical, guess-what's-real head game for the age of
the Avid, but in essence it's just a feature-length retread of
the famously nagging final shot of the first Blair Witch.
A movie can lap-dance you with the unknown for only so long before
it eventually has to come across; the sequel does, but it's less
satisfying than dispiriting. The movie works up to a big revelation
that doesn't surprise anyone; did the filmmakers lose sight of
their own audience, which is hip enough to catch on?
The group of five -- tour guide Jeffrey Donovan, indignant Wiccan
Erica Leerhsen, sneering goth chick Kim Director, and troubled
couple Tristan Skyler and Stephen Barker Turner (who are working
on a book about the Blair Witch legend) -- head into the bleak
woods, hoping to catch traces of something, if indeed there is
something. One good idea thrown away in Book of Shadows
is that few people really take the Blair Witch thing all that
seriously; the site of the famous murders is a kitschy tourist
trap, luring curiosity seekers from all over the world (as the
actual shooting locations of the original movie did). For a while,
Book of Shadows seems interested in deconstructing all
the myth and hype that gathered around The Blair Witch Project
and then starting fresh. It goes stale fast, though.
After the black-out, during which all the camera equipment is
destroyed but the tapes are mysteriously deposited in the same
spot where Heather's tapes were reportedly found, the group heads
back to Jeffrey's isolated hang-out in the woods, where he sells
Blair Witch memorabilia and maintains a state-of-the-art
video studio with stolen equipment. Everyone sits down to watch
the tapes, which reveal, little by little, what happened that
night. Individually, they also have weird dreams and visions
that seem connected to the long-ago Blair Witch murders. After
a while the inevitable finger-pointing begins. Something strange
happened, and the Wiccan is responsible! No, wait, it's the goth
chick! No, obviously it's the tour guide!
This gets old as quickly as you'd expect (at least the quarreling
over the lost map in the first Blair Witch didn't feel
quite so much like a bad Twilight Zone episode). The director,
Joe Berlinger (who cowrote the script with Dick Beebe, writer
of 1999's House
on Haunted Hill remake, which had similar freak-out scenes),
comes from documentaries -- brilliant ones, actually, the best-known
being the Paradise Lost films he co-directed. Here he
seems to be trying something so deep-dish with a story so shallow
that the depth dries out. Berlinger appears to be saying that
reality as experienced by the characters (and as captured by
Berlinger's film camera) is false, and that the true reality
can only be seen on the unforgiving medium of video. He blurts
this out when he has a character say something like "Film
lies; video is truth." Yet when we finally see the videos
in their full Dionysian horror (or what passes for it), we don't
know why it's the truth. Once again, that devilish unseen
Blair Witch is messing around with people's heads. She sure seems
to like to pick on wannabe documentary filmmakers, though; it's
as if she wanted to work her evil only on those in a position
to record her witchery. I'd say you have nothing to worry about
in the woods of Burkittsville as long as you don't have a camcorder
with you.
I am far from a fan of the first Blair Witch, which turned
out, rather embarrassingly for its admirers, to have been ripped
off from the far better shot-on-video horror project The Last
Broadcast. And even before that, movies like Cannibal
Holocaust (from 1978, mind you) dealt with the "group
of documentary filmmakers met their doom and here's their footage"
premise. But at least Blair Witch had an air of otherworldly
strangeness about it; the hand-held camera pulled you into the
position of being with the three protagonists (whether
you wanted to be with these three whiners was another
story). Book of Shadows has no such you-are-there hook;
we're just observers here, and what we observe is the usual hack
and slash, served to us in grisly flashes. After a while, the
movie becomes ugly and unpleasant, and finally just irritating.
The arguing goes on and on, until you just want someone to die
so you can go home already. If Joe Berlinger wanted to break
into narrative filmmaking, he should've picked a film with a
narrative. |
