Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Blair Witch II

Movie Guru Rating:
Meditative (3 out of 5)

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Try as he might, director Joe Berlinger can't quite scare up a satisfying Blair Witch sequel.

by Coury Turczyn

Joe Berlinger must be one sorry bastard.

Certainly, somebody had to take the bullet, and Artisan found just the right fall-guy to do it. I have to hand it to the suits—their choice has a certain poetic irony: To follow up the most successful indie film in history—a fake documentary—the studio hired a real documentary maker to direct a fake movie. For a moment or two, the senses tingle with a spark of hope; maybe, just maybe, this Berlinger guy will pull it off. He's smart enough to have co-directed Brother's Keeper, right? Perhaps he'll come up with a genius twist that'll make this unholy (and inevitable) project come together.

But no. It was a suicide mission from the start: Anybody attempting to make a sequel to The Blair Witch Project is doomed to an early grave, pleasing neither its fans nor its detractors. Despite his intelligence and wit, Berlinger joins the zombie graveyard of faceless sequel directors past.

That's not because the original Blair Witch was such an immortal piece of filmmaking; despite the tearful genuflecting of critics across the land, it wasn't. It was, however, a very clever one-shot gimmick that can never be repeated. While The Blair Witch Project did indeed deliver an alarming sense of creepiness—that suffocating feeling of being lost and disconnected from the civilized world—its most lasting impression was the story of its production and marketing. To make the actors film their own movie, and then to create a backstory that brilliantly intermingled reality and fiction, were masterstrokes of indie ballyhoo filmmaking. William Castle, who offered a Lloyd's of London Insurance policy against accidental death by fright during screenings of Macabre (1958), would've been proud. But nobody's ever going to fall for that stuff again. So when it comes to revolutionizing cinema and movie marketing, I'm afraid Blair Witch never had a ghost of a chance. As for still being a viable money-making franchise, well...

Well, Berlinger does his damnedest to do a respectable job. Although he keeps the same basic premise—trapping the audience with a group of whining, shrieking slackers armed with video cameras—he wisely jettisons the whole this-is-the-lost-footage-they-shot conceit. In fact, he starts Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 very cannily by parodying the mania that surrounded the original movie. Conjuring up some of the old Blair Witch Project moxie, we see a montage of news reports about bewitched film fans swarming the now uncomfortably famous town of Burkittsville, Md. But then, trouble: flashes of spurting blood, bludgeoned heads, and then a young man in a psych ward having a large tube being jammed down his nose and a viscous fluid poured in. What does it all mean? For the most part, it means the studio execs wanted some more gore thrown in.

As for the story itself, Berlinger comes up with a workable premise: Now released from the mental institution, the young man (Jeffrey Donovan) capitalizes on Blair Witch mania by selling fake souvenirs and guiding tourists through those infamous woods. His first group consists of a defensive Wiccan (Erica Leerhsen), a surly Goth (Kim Director), and a grad student couple (Tristen Skyler and Stephen Barker Turner). He takes them out to the site where the original tapes were supposedly found, the stone foundation of an abandoned house, and they set up camp. They proceed to get drunk and high, talk meanderingly, then pass out. The next morning, they discover all their video cameras destroyed, and a good chunk of time missing from their lives.

What happened? They return to town (who knew leaving those woods could be so easy?) and stay at their guide's ramshackle factory/house to review the videotapes for clues. Then bad stuff happens. Right about here, things start going awry—for the film. Although we can see where Berlinger is trying to lead us—into a darkness where people can't trust their own perceptions—he never quite cinches the deal. He wants us to wonder whether these kids are really experiencing supernatural evil, or just their own hype-addled delusions. And we do, if not in a very entertaining manner. The things that happen to the group are only intermittently spooky, and they don't seem to advance much of the Blair Witch's mythos—doesn't she have any new tricks up her sleeves? Instead, the slackers go on a paranoid rampage, seeing things that may or may not be happening, most having to do with deep scratches in their bodies. Then one of them turns up dead. And finally, they start yelling at each other a lot, just like in the original.

Perhaps the true problem lies with the characters—they're just not that interesting. Whereas the original movie's trio was notable for their mundane reality—it's a documentary, you know—here we're in a traditional horror movie, and that requires us to care about the main characters before they get skewered. But except for Director's seething Goth girl, these characters don't have inner lives that rope us into their dilemmas. Combine that with Berlinger's lack of technical know-how for creating sustained terror (this is his first fictional movie), and you've got your standard, mediocre horror flick—though one that tries really hard to have a thematic point. To give the ill-fated Berlinger his due, that's a hell of a lot more than any of the equally-mediocre Scream movies have ever attempted. Perhaps someday he'll get another chance to direct a feature.

Two mysteries remain, though: 1. Whatever happened to that damn "Book of Shadows" mentioned in the title? And, 2. Will Artisan still dare to film a Blair Witch prequel? Only the Internet knows...