Friday, October 2, 2015

Scary Movie Month 2015 Day 2: Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

After loving New Nightmare yesterday it made me want to revisit this, its spiritual cousin, another sequel (albeit a franchise-killingly early sequel) that exists as a commentary on its predecessor and exists with one foot in the movies and one foot in reality (so to speak).

Here's the thing about Blair Witch 2: it's not the worst. It's not good, not really, but it's certainly not the clusterfuck its detractors maintain it is. The original Blair Witch Project was a revelation, a cheaply-produced nightmare generator that made boatloads of money and kicked off the found-footage craze, for better or (mostly) worse. This one, which came out only a year later, takes a more classical approach while also being a radical departure from conventional storytelling thanks to a fractured timeline and a storyline that blurs the lines between movies and reality. 

The story follows a group on a "Blair Witch Tour" of Burkittsville, Maryland (the location of the first movie) as they explore the possible truth behind the legend of the Blair Witch and the movie The Blair Witch Project. Of course nothing is quite as it seems, and there are suggestions that an evil force is up to all sorts of murderous supernatural shenanigans among them. It's flashier, louder, and gorier than the first (not difficult, as there's not a single drop of blood shed onscreen in the original), but that certainly doesn't make it any better (or scarier).

Jeffrey Donovan (of Burn Notice and my mom's daydreams) is appealingly charismatic in the lead, and I applaud the audaciousness on display. The first movie was such a cultural phenomenon that it would have been a no-brainer for the studio to send a handful of kids back into the woods with a camera (and no tripod) for a total rehash, but instead they hired noted documentarian Joe Berlinger (the incredible Paradise Lost trilogy, feature-length group therapy session Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) to make a slick, nasty little meta-fiction. It doesn't work very well, the movie is a muddled mess with a couple of very bad performances and a dopey reliance on half-baked twists but still...the attempt at keeping the franchise fresh is notable and interesting and I'd rather see a movie reach for something new and fail than rehash the same old same old. There has been talk over the years of reviving the series and I'd have welcomed a return to Burkittsville with a third entry, but I imagine I'd have been alone in that theater. Better than being alone in the woods, I suppose. 

What's that noise?

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