| BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2 Release Date: 27/10/00 Certificate: 15 Official Website Director: Joe Berlinger Producers: Bill Carrero, Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez Screenplay: Dick Beebe, Neal Stevens, Joe Berlinger & Jon Bokencamp |
| The original Blair Witch Project was one of the biggest box-office successes of last summer. Of course this was mainly because it cost peanuts and a gullible public flocked to see it. Directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick came up with a fairly good idea, stick a bunch of actors with cameras deep inside some woods and get them to improvise being hunted by an unseen force. Whilst at the same time sneaking around their campsite and scarig them in the night. The result was shown at the Cannes Film Festival as real footage. The impact made it quite poweful, and the movie got great reviews from it. For it's theatrical release the directors went further and set up some websites about the Witch that purported to be factual. Unfortunately on this side of the Pond the myth that the film was real had been exploded, and the movie was riding across the Altlantic on a tidal wave of hype that it could never live up to, even if it had been a half-decent film. Unfortunately it was pretty poor, and was more boring than scary. Flash forward about a year and the sequel arrives. Called Book Of Shadows for no discernable reason, this is a proper movie with a budget and a script and everything. Postmodernly this film acknowledges that it's predecessor exists. |
| It opens with real footage about the success of the original, and of real inhabitants of Birkettsville bitching about having freaks and goths wandering about their inbred community. An enterprising former looney-bin inmate called Jeffrey has started a shop selling those wooden figures that failed to be scary in the first film, and does up his van to do "Blair Witch Hunts." The inaugural hunt sees him accompanied by foxy witch Erica, a psychic goth-girl, Kim, and Tristena and Stephen, a couple who are writing about the Blair Witch phenomenon. They go into the woods, armed with the obligatory video cameras, for lots of 'atmospheric' shakey footage. The movie itself is not shot like this, it's made as a conventional movie, but an opening caption claims that's it a reconstruction based on real events precipitated by the first movie's release. This is not referred to any further, and seems more like a nod to the fiction/reality blending of the original. The group camp out in the ruins of a house that the Blair Witch supposedly occupied, and where Heather Donahue's footage was found. They all mysteriously black-out for five hours. When they awaken their camp has been wrecked, cameras smashed, and the tapes are hidden in the same place as Heather's. The female writer has a miscarriage, so they go to hospital, then back to Jeffrey's spooky old factory in the Woods, to watch the tapes and find out what happened to them. But Something has followed them... Documentary-filmmaker Joe Berlinger's first feature is well directed, I like the mysterious glimpses of gory massacre that we are afforded. These serve as flash-backs within flashbacks, as the movie's structure has the story unfold from the point where the survivors, revealed one-by-one, are being questionned by police. There is a slight surprise at the end, but, in the tradition of the first Blair Witch it totally fails to deliver what the amount of build-up seems to promise. It is possibly worse in this case, given the budget and resources that this one must have had. The Blair Witch actually goes quite easy on these youngsters, and should have provided a decent climax to the movie. Better than the original, but that's hardly an achievement. Ultimately as disappointing. 3/10 |
 |
| Buy the DVD: |
 |
 |