BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2 If you watch the movie in reverse, is there less foreshadowing? It's hard to imagine a movie doomed to encounter more cynicism than Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. The Blair Witch Project encountered precisely three kinds of responses: lusty embrace, utter indifference, or great dislike. Neat combination; combine that with the fact that the original film was a brilliantly (over)marketed and was still a super-low-budget out-of-nowhere surprise hit, and all three groups will agree on two things: that the sequel will be inevitable, and that it will be a sad, incompetent bandwagon-jump. And, maybe it is a bandwagon-jump, but it's an interesting and well-made one, and it's nowhere near as obvious and expected as I was suspecting it would be. It's not without its problems (most notably, its baffling structure), but it's so much better than so much of the dreck that's come out in recent years that my own cynicism mostly just melts away. Mostly. Opening up with a title card telling us that it's a "fictionalized re-enactment" of events after The Blair Witch Project was released, BOS (which doesn't actually contain a book of shadows, or even refer to one) surprisingly acknowledges that the first movie was just that, a movie. We don't get any shots of Heather, Josh or Mike on the talk-show circuit, but it's interesting to see a "sequel" which knows its predecessor was fiction. One Burkittsville resident even makes the not-unreasonable complaint that the original filmmakers (producers here) should've given more thought about the consequences of using the word "documentary" in the promo material and on the website. Truth be told, this opening suggests a more promising film and interesting approach than the one that ultimately unravels. So everybody knows the Heather, Josh and Mike are just fine. The question is, how much truth is there to the Blair Witch legend, and is there even a legend at all? Hell if I know, and since this movie is complete fiction too, don't expect it to enlighten you, but that's kind of the point here; it's NOT knowing which gets people thinking and doing weird things. That's why the opening mini-documentary with the Burkittsvillians looked like neat stuff; think of the weirdos this poor town has had to deal with in the last couple of years. Instead, what this movie focuses on is more-or-less straight narrative fiction, with five twentysomethings, as part of a tour group, venturing into the Black Hills with some video cameras to check out the ruins of Rustin Pharr's place. One of these guys, Jeffrey (or is it Steven?) (like in the first film, their first names are the same as that as the actors') runs these tours as a business and lives in an abandoned broom factory (bwa ha ha). So they go in, encounter another tour group (which they promptly shoo away), and get rip-roaring drunk. They pass out and awaken the next day with cameras smashed, notes shredded, and videotapes buried (found with the aid of the one girl who appears to be psychic). When one of the girls has a miscarriage, they have to go back into town, where things just get weirder and weirder. The characters are all either non-entities (Jeffrey - or is it Steven? -was in a mental hospital, but what of it?) or curiously knowing stereotypes. For example, Erica the Wiccan assumes that every time somebody says the word "witch" they're talking about her (Wiccans always seem to think that they've got a monopoly on the word). Or Kim the goth girl keeps trying to shock in the least shocking ways, like sticking her tongue out at the camera and making little devil horns with her fingers. Stereotypes, maybe, but these details are so spot-on! BOS looks great, quite a contrast from the on-the-cheap original, which I guess is to be expected when you actually have a cinematographer on staff. It's been a while since the woods looked so good, though to be fair only the first third or so of the movie takes place in there; most of the rest is back at the broom factory (sounds like a voiceover in the old Batman TV series: "Meanwhile, back at the broom factory..."). The actors here are also a more experienced bunch than the original three; not quite so much that any of them are actually familiar faces, and one of them is actually willing to get naked for the camera (yes!). As much as you might have heard about how bad the acting is here, it's just not that bad. Trust me, I just saw Casper Van Dien in Python the other day. The actors in this movie? Not bad. For that matter, except for the silly thing of mentioning that she's psychic about a half-dozen times in the first fifteen minutes (and then never mentioning it again), I really liked Kim Director as the goth girl. I've said before, too much eye makeup drives me wild. The biggest problem with this movie has to be its awkward, rickety structure; not sure if this has more to do with the script (by Dick Beebe and director Joe Berlinger), the direction, or the editing. Loaded with hallucinations, flashbacks and flash-forwards, it's often tricky to tell whether you're seeing what you're "supposed" to be seeing, or one of those others. A prime example of this would be the sheriff's interrogation of Jeffrey/Steven; we see a bit of this early on, and it turns out to be a flash-forward, though you wouldn't know what the hell it is at the time. Later, when the girl who miscarried is brought to the hospital, the two have another interrogation scene, set at a totally different time, actually set some time before the one alluded to earlier, but at this point for all we know it's the same interrogation...see what I mean? There are other problems; the out-of-place, useless gore neither serves a purpose nor is very interesting gore-wise; there are only so many times I can see a knife plunge into a stomach before the shock factor disappears entirely. The intrusive hard-rock soundtrack is annoying and even the low-key music over the climactic montage of video dampens its effect. And the "surprise"-loaded plot isn't really all that surprising; those flash-forwards tell us way more than we need to know way too soon, and don't give a reason for telling us. Very much common problems these days, and all quite avoided by The Blair Witch Project; love it or hate it, most would admit that today's horror filmmakers have a lot to learn from it. Maybe most problematic is the simple fact that BOS adds nothing to the myth surrounding the Blair Witch. What it does succeed at is effectively plunging the viewer into a world where even if The Blair Witch Project was fiction, the Blair Witch herself was once the real deal; nevertheless, by the end of this movie there really is about as much Blair Witch as there is...well, a book of shadows. It's hard to watch this movie without having frequent (and apparently intended) reminders of Berlinger's most famous work, the documentary Paradise Lost, about three teenagers who were convicted of a triple murder with what might charitably be called questionable evidence. The goth girl makes a remark about how where she comes from, everybody thinks she's some sort of killer because of her black clothes (sound familiar?). By the time the story is resolved (kind of), the parallels get unavoidable, though I would hardly call the evidence seen at the end of this movie "questionable" from the point of any jury. Lanny Flaherty as the town sheriff even provokes some knowing guffaws with his performance, reminiscent as it is of that of a certain toothless freak from Paradise Lost. I dunno, guys. I can't quite get all excited and worked up about this one, but it doesn't deserve the beating it's taken. It tried to do something a little different from the original, and maybe found itself a little too close to the slasher schlock that clogs our cinemas today but it's still trying to remain quite apart from them too. Problems it's got, but there are a lot of better targets for your bile out there. C'mon, I've seen worse than this in the past two days, and I barely rent at all anymore. Since anyone watching this movie now is going to be doing so on video, I may as well comment on "The Secret Of Esrever", the impossibly badly-named collection of hidden goodies alluded to in a small feature after the closing credits. I figured it'd be fun to check this out, so I did, though nothing really came of it. Three examples are given ("cutting room floor" stuff) of the kind of thing we're supposed to look out for, and you start rewinding while playing at the end of the feature to find out where you're supposed to look for them. Or, you could just watch the feature again put the results in reverse. Anyway, the hints as to where we're supposed to look just aren't very much help, since what is referred to could mean any number of shots or scenes. After a zip through the entire film in fast-forward, I didn't find a single thing. Turns out most of them are virtually impossible to see on VHS. I know, I know, buy a DVD player, Brian. Not any time soon, and I'll tell you the big reason why soon enough (other than the fact that buying DVD's would cut into my CD-buying budget). For a better-than-I-can-give-you look at what's going on here, go to: http://www.realastos.org/movies/bos/index.html If there's some sort of "secret message" linking this all together, it's escaping me. As it turns out, there are dozens of things like this, not just the five alluded to after the credits. This movie is LOADED with 'em. Going through the film AGAIN to find them all would be insane. So, thank God for the internet, and people on it who exhaustively look into things more religiously than I could ever hope to have the patience for... http://www.blairwitchfanclub.com/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=000539&p= There ya go, hope you have more luck with it than I did. BACK TO THE B's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE