Oct 052000
 
two reels

An ex-mental patient (Jeffrey Donovan) takes a writer (Stephen Barker Turner), his pregnant co-writer (Tristine Skyler), a Wiccain (Erica Leerhsen), and a goth chick (Kim Director) on a tour of Blair Witch sites.  After a drunken night camping in the woods, they awaken to find their cameras and notes destroyed, and the pregnant woman has had a miscarriage.  They hope that the videotapes of the night’s events will show them what happened, but instead, the images only confuse matters.

Ripped apart by almost every critic and a majority of fans, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was mainly attacked for not being The Blair Witch Project.  People flocked to this film, expecting to see another group of under-trained actors wander through the woods making a mock-documentary, and when that didn’t pop up on screen, screamed bloody murder, and then no one else went.  Why people so wanted a repeat of the first film is one of those mysteries I’ll never understand.  Hey, if you liked the first one, go watch it.

This sequel tries to be something else, and while it isn’t successful, I’ll give it points for the attempt.  The world of Book of Shadows is our world, where the first film was a huge hit, the naive were fooled into thinking that something scary actually happened, and lowlifes make substantial bucks from selling Blair Witch memorabilia.  The film starts as  a documentary on how the hype affected a small town that needs some chlorine in its gene pool.  That’s good stuff, but thankfully short as five minutes covers anything interesting.

Things then switch to 35mm film.  Yes, this is a professional movie, with a paid crew and SAG actors.  If you wanted shaky DV shots, get over it.  Forget the first film and take this for what it is.

The setup is slow, but the characters are engaging enough to keep me with them.  They appear at first to be stereotypes, but end up as complicated personalities.  Erica Leerhsen and Kim Director standout, but all the lead actors excel.  The same cannot be said for the supporting players.  The worst is Lanny Flaherty, but it is hard to blame him when he was given the poorly written, one-dimensional Sheriff role.

The basic concept of Book of Shadows is an excellent one.  It’s a mystery, where something horrible happened in the night, and the answer is somewhere on a group of tapes.  But each time something is found, things become more confused.  That’s the stuff of great thrillers and horror films.  Plus, it is an amusing comment on the first film as it becomes clear that you can’t trust what you see on video.

But, all is not well.  There are way too many dreams and visions, with several repeating over and over.  Yes, someone was knifed in the stomach and someone else was tied up; I got it the first ten times.  Most of these shouldn’t have been shown at all as they give away the ending.  Ten minutes of hallucinations should have been cut.  There’s also needless flashbacks.  Multiple times, we’re shown one character in an asylum, but it leads to nothing.

And I think an investigation is needed to look at not only this small town’s police work, but also its medical care.  After a miscarriage that involved massive blood loss, the hospital releases the patient.  I don’t think so.

Much of the dialog feels like it was written for a previous incarnation of the script, where the main characters were old friends.  They are often too familiar with each other, at least when they aren’t having unnecessary dreams of having sex or slashing open each other’s abdomens.

The real failing comes from following the first film’s lead.  Once again, there is no resolution.  People come.  Bad things happen.  The end.  A lot of whys and wherefores would have been out of place, but some explanations, some closure, some meaning, would have been nice.  Nothing the heroes did in the film made any difference, so what was the point of watching them do things?

Director Joe Berlinger is primarily known for his documentary films Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and Revelations: Paradise Lost 2.  These films explored the conviction of two goth teens for murder in a small town in Arkansas, where fear of strange kids and Satanists had more to do with them being put away than any evidence.  Book of Shadows, with its pleasant, thoughtful goth, good natured Wiccan, mindless and violent small town population, and simpleminded sheriff, touches on the same themes as the documentaries.  That makes it even more disappointing that the film falls short of what it could have been.

Oh, and there is no Book of Shadows in the picture.

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