Word: witchingly
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...original movie was a cool joke America decided to play on itself. The Blair Witch Project, which last year earned a huge $140 million on a teeny $30,000 budget, was not by any stretch a great film. It was a clever prank, brilliantly peddled, that played on primal fears. And everyone had to be a part of it. Let's be scared by a horror movie with no visible monster. Let's convince ourselves it's real. Like kids in the dark, let's pretend...
...would want to play the same joke twice, or be the butt of it? Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 arms a new bunch of young people with video cameras, throws them into the Maryland woods and lets hysteria ensue. The notion of director Joe Berlinger and writer Dick Beebe is that the five new recruits (Jeffrey Donovan, Tristen Skyler, Stephen Barker Turner, Erica Leerhsen and Kim Director) know the first film was fake and are cynical of the industry built around it, yet get sucked into the legend. Then everyone goes nuts--this time with flash cuts and gross...
...Blair Witch Project may have been riddled with flaws, but it was still one of the most unique films in years, so how can Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 possibly match that level of inventiveness? Well, the simple answer is that it doesn't even attempt to. Packaged and shipped barely a year after the original, BW2 is a painfully mediocre, decidedly unimaginative horror movie that does little more than ride the first Blair Witch's coattails and proves every bit as derivative as its predecessor was clever. The first mistake was in thinking that a workable sequel could...
...producers, to their credit, made an intriguing move in selecting documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Paradise Lost) to helm the project. On paper, the choice is inspired-who better to tackle the pseudo-reality of the Blair Witch than a man who's spent his entire career grappling with the constructs of the non-fictional? But whatever documentary instincts Berlinger may have honed over the years can't help his script, co-written with Dick Beebe, which unfolds with all the imagination and genre-challenging of a "Tales From the Crypt" episode. The premise at least taps nicely into the vein...
Like in the original Blair Witch Project, the characters share the same name as the actors who play them, but since there is no pretense that any of this is "real," then what's the point of the device? But then that's the main problem with Blair Witch 2-Berlinger wants to have his cake and eat it too. He tries too hard to force the aura of the first film into a regular narrative structure. The sequel tries to be like the first Blair Witch by not bothering to provide anything in the way of answers for what...