Book of Shadows, aka Blair Witch 2 (2000) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

The Robbins recipe: Angel Heart meets The Shining. Yes, that's right, it's a standard mystery/horror film that has absolutely no relationship to Blair Witch Project in tone or style, except to use the Blair Witch Hysteria as a backdrop for the film, and to make fun of it!

First of all, it is the most poorly marketed film of the past decade, despite the fact that it is a sequel to the marketing marvel of the past decade. It is a slick and conventional horror movie. Let's think about that. The world is divided into people who loved Blair Witch, and those who hated it. If you hated Blair Witch, you're not going to see the sequel are you? And if you loved Blair Witch, you are going to find none of those elements you loved in this "sequel". So who the hell is the target market for this movie?

Third, this is a watchable film, sometimes spooky, sometimes damned funny, marred only by a uniformly unappealing cast of characters, which therefore prevents you from the real emotional identification that you need to make a horror movie work. But, you know what, if I could have liked the characters enough to care what happened to them, I would have thought this was a great horror movie. Even as it is, it isn't great, but it isn't bad at all.

The film deals quite effectively with the seemingly impossible task of rebuilding the fourth wall. Remember that the first movie was such a phenomenon because of its documentary feel, and the concurrent internet campaign that made the Blair Witch Legend seem to be part of a real belief system, and made the belief system itself seem to be based on real events. Well, now we know that it was just a movie, so how do you do a sequel? They came up with a working solution. This film talks about the mania and hysteria created in Burkittsville and the Black Hills by the first movie. It shows how the local people's lives are now affected by tourists and curiosity seekers who come to take pictures and buy souvenirs, and ask if anything was based on reality. They used five unknown actors, and they all played characters with their own first names, to make it seem real. Bingo, the wall is back up.

One of the lead characters is a guy who makes a living by conducting the Blair Witch Hunt, a tourist program through the venues of the first film. The rest of the leads are his tourists.

The first four minutes are terrific, absolutely excellent. They show how people reacted to the first Blair Witch movie, and they are mostly interviews with locals, who seem to be an especially daft group, even by the standards of small-town movie America. One character comments that the gene pool in the area is a mite too shallow.

The next forty minutes are not bad at all as a psychological mystery. The tour group spends the night in the ruins of the witch's cottage, surrounded by cameras to record their every move from many angles. They lose several hours of time during the night, and when they wake up, they are surrounded by utter chaos as all their possessions and their film equipment have been destroyed. Then one of them says "we still have the tapes". How could she know that? She doesn't know how she knows. She has some spooky sixth sense, and she just knows it. She even knows that they have been hidden, and she knows where they are hidden. She has The Shining. The others, of course, think she must have been the one who did it.

Well, it turns out that when they get back and replay the tapes, there are time gaps in the recordings that seem to match their own sense of lost time. The camera timer jumps from one o'clock to three o'clock, and nobody can explain it. Perhaps Rosemary Woods was in charge of the tapes. About the same time as the sudden timer jump, there is a faint image which flashes by, and data manipulation shows it to be a naked picture of ---- one of the tourists. Not the one with the psychic powers, but another one who actually claims to be a witch, but has no memory of wandering around the woods naked, and you'd think she'd remember that because it is mid-November. So now the others think she did it. Except for those who think the psychic girl did it, and those who think Rosemary Woods did it.

The last forty minutes are not so good, but I still liked the way they resolved it, handling it more as a creepy mystery movie with a supernatural overlay, rather than as a horror film, and gradually unraveling the characters' own sense of confusion about what happened.

The film didn't really supply any closure or any explanation, although it did finally show all the missing parts of the tapes. The point was that the things on the tapes didn't seem to be what really happened but, after all, they defined reality to the outside world. They now represent reality, don't they? All simple memories are, by definition, less real to the outside world. I thought the ending was creepy, spooky, and surprising. It reminded me a little bit of the ending to "Angel Heart", and I liked the fact that they showed everything but explained nothing, leaving the audience to use some imagination.

Tuna's comments in yellow:

Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows (2000) is the official sequel to Blair Witch. If you liked Blair Witch, you will hate it. If you think, as I do, that it was at least as big a hoax as Milli Vanilli or the recent Dubya mandate from the voters, this one is a more interesting film. The studios selected documentary director Joe Berlinger, then forced changes to his concept. In a rather bitter commentary, he explains what he wanted to make. The idea was to show a pseudo-documentary at the beginning showing the aftermath of Blair Witch, then lead into a tour of the main Blair Witch locations by a couple of grad students, a Wiccan, a psychic Goth person, and a tour guide.

While in the woods, they meet up with another tour group, all fall asleep, and wake up to find all of their papers and equipment trashed, but some tapes remaining. Up to this point, the director had planed on a light-hearted romp in the woods. The second half of the film was to be an increasingly sinister investigation into what happened  the night before, which, it turns out, included the murder of the other tour group. Berlinger was hoping for a very ambiguous ending, where you weren't sure if the damage was done by some sort of mass hysteria, or by an evil presence.

The studio insisted, at the last minute, to insert gore scenes randomly throughout the film. They were shot in one afternoon behind Berlinger's house. The studio also insisted that police interrogation, which was supposed to be at the end of the film, be intercut. I suspect the film Berlinger wanted to release would have been even better. Everyone agrees that this film is crap, but I place it way above the original. Berlinger did used a lot of steady cam to give a documentary feel, but did not use what he calls the "shakeycam" technique of Blair Witch. Erica Leerhsen's breasts are seen on one of the tapes, and in some hallucinations, although they are mostly hidden by hair.