Hey folks, Harry here... Well, being that this is a sequel to a film that many people either LOVED or HATED... opinions on the sequel might very well follow suit... or be... well, it could be just a bad movie. Personally, I'm hoping not because I feel Joe Berlinger is an excellent filmmaker... However, this does not hold well. Of course I hold had you cut 20 minutes of random shit out of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT... it might very well have seemed like complete crap... since... basically, the whole point was to be caught up in the characters.... putting together pieces... well, I've never been a big fan. Either show the movie or not. That's the way to go. As a result, we have the opinion of someone that has seen rough footage not in the context of the entire film, admitted as being temp footage and incomplete. Folks, let's wait and see what the entire film is like... but this, well undeniably doesn't sound very good. Here ya go...
Hi Harry,
Here are my thoughts on the 20 minutes of rough footage that a select group was shown at the AMC theater in old Pasadena last weekend. A number of passes were given out to people at the Fango convention, and it was one of the things I was looking forward to most. You see, at the previous Pasadena Fango, I got to meet Ed Sanchez and Dan Myrick, and got to see an advance screening of BWP before the hype. I enjoyed the hell out of what I saw and I quickly began to spread the word to pretty much anyone I knew. Soon I had hooked many friends into watching it , believing it was real footage. Well, sitting there at the AMC, I had an open mind to the upcoming footage, realizing it was all rough material, with a temp score. I was excited by the different approach taken for the sequel, and the synopsis that was handed out sounded interesting enough. The footage shown was to be non-linear scenes, without many FX added yet. The lights went out without any introduction, no one to explain anything we were about to see, but I didn't take that as a bad sign. The footage opened with Sinatra singing "Witchcraft", a nice choice. The camera work flying over the black hills area set a much lighter mood than I had expected. The film started out fine, I was into it, for about 90 seconds. As soon as the characters were introduced, I felt something was very wrong. I was immediately snapped out of the film, as the actors seemed as if they were acting in a television commercial. The two male leads were uncharismatic and more importantly unlikeable. In contrast, the cast of BWP seemed almost like people I knew, and I liked all of them. No matter how irritating they were at points, I didn't want them to die.The three female cast members played a goth, a witch and a girlfriend of the blondish actor. The goth was said to be a psychic, with a silly introduction laying over a tombstone, smoking a cigarette. The Witch is of the wiccan variety, and both she and the goth seem to be rejects from the film The Craft. TActually the casting choices reminded me of people from MTV's Road Rules, and I don't mean that in a good way. Tthe characters are once again in search of the Blair Witch, and they journey into the same woods and set up camp at the ruin of Rustin Parr's cabin. They all fall asleep only to awake to find their research work destroyed. This leads to the blame game, and the girlfriend character has a miscarriage. The scene shown following is in the hospital where the girlfriend sees the ghost of a girl, who walks backwards and is obviously supposed to be frightening but is anything but. There are flashes of this ghost throughout the footage shown, but nothing gave me a fraction of the chills I got watching the first BWP. The following scenes show that the characters are now holed up in a huge warehouse style building in the Black Woods, filled with computers. They are in the proccess of analyzing their video footage from the night that none of them remember, and begin to notice strange things in the footage, like skips in the timecode, and blurred naked figures. I won't reveal and more surprises (they're actually not surprising at all), but they have obviously brought something back with them. I'm amazed that none of them brought a cell phone, especially since the character have full knowledge of what happened with Heather, Mike and Josh. I'm sorry to break the bad news, but from the footage shown, Book of Shadows is a bore.
call me NightGod
