A friend of mine works for the local alt-rock station here in Atlanta, and he gave me passes to a preview screening of the sequel last night. The screening was sponsored by Pete’s Wicked Ale®.
Briefly, it was a bad movie. More lengthily:
Like the first movie, Book of Shadows names its twentysomething characters after the actors who play them, they have a supernatural experience in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, and they make obsessive use of videotape.
Unlike the first movie, there is no pretense of its being a documentary. The premise, in fact, is the one truly inventive idea in the movie: it acknowledges the original movie as fiction. One of the characters in the new movie is a Burkittsville huckster, Jeff, proprietor of “The Blair Witch Store” on the Internet, who organizes a tour called “The Blair Witch Hunt” to the foundation of the house where Heather Donahue’s “footage” was “found.” The rest of the principal characters are Jeff’s tourists.
So you see, already we’re in trouble: in the world of the film, the first movie was fiction, but apparently some of the “mythology” made up for it was real. This is the first of many things never sorted out in Book of Shadows.
Too many things. After the night in the woods, the tourists go back to Jeff’s home, where mayhem ensues. One of the characters, Kim, has several psychic flashes of insight during the movie, as when she guesses another woman’s new pregnancy without being told. She seems as surprised by these as anyone else, and we wonder how this will become relevant to the story. As it turns out, it isn’t. Kim could have been named Exposition Girl.
It’s established early on that Jeff is a former mental patient. We wait to see how this is relevant to the story. As it turns out, it isn’t.
From the git-go we wonder what a “Book of Shadows” is, and what it has to do with the story. As it turns out, we never do.
The sheriff of Burkittsville is a ridiculous Barney Fife cartoon of a character.
Jeff has an alarm on the front door of his home that makes the sound of angry barking dogs when it’s opened. As soon as this is brought up, I knew we would have a scene where the door is opened and actual barking dogs are outside. The movie didn’t let me down.
In another painful clichè, the sheriff calls Jeff and tells him to turn on his television. Jeff complies and the first thing we see on the screen is the words “Special Report” followed by the exact bit of news the plot needed at that point. The sheriff didn’t even have to tell Jeff what channel to tune to. I’m surprised they didn’t hire the guy who played the radio announcer’s voice on Gilligan’s Island.
Besides all that, this movie has “Hollywoodized successor to indie phenom” written all over it. The actors are clearly, [stage voice][sweeping flourish]Acting![/sweeping flourish][/stage voice]. The cinematography is bright and colorful. The shots are edited. Product placements of Pete’s Wicked Ale® are all over the place. Ugh.
Save your time and money, folks. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is yet another bad movie in a very bad year for movies. If you liked the first movie, you won’t like this one at all. If you didn’t like the first movie, you’ll dislike this one in a completely different way.
