Hey folks, Harry here with Wicked Ale's look at BLAIR WITCH 2. Now.. the word from Europe was that the film was a complet uncontrollable bomb in our first review. But now... Press screenings and promotional screenings are beginning to sprout up across the United States. This is the first response I've received from that run of screenings and... while I wouldn't call it a positive, I wouldn't call it negative... It's somewhere in the middle... It seems that he kinda liked it, but not all the way... which is a far cry from it being a COMPLETE BOMB. Also... I believe it were a COMPLETE BOMB... that perhaps Artisan would be HIDING the film viciously... but instead they seem willing to show it. In fact, 2 days ago I got the phone call from Artisan trying to set up a screening to show me the film. To me... this is a good sign... they don't want to hide it, they want to show it... and specifically they want to show me the film... and I'm probably one of the biggest supporters of the first film... that also came out and said there was no need for this sequel... except that I like Joe Berlinger's Documentary work. I have to say... I've got a bad feeling, but I don't want it to be bad. I'm going in... not taking all the hype of the original film with me, prepared for a different film style... hoping that it's just a good horror film. I'll let you folks know Sunday afternoon/evening. Till then... here's WICKED ALE with the latest assessment...
Hi Harry! Hi world! WICKED ALE here in Unspeakable, California, having just chugged down a BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2 screening.
Regardless of whether you though the first BWP was "one of the scariest movies ever made" or a gigantic rip-off that typified a hyped-up year of non-event (remember when the world was going to end ala "Y2K"?), it took an aggressively experimental approach to creating horror with it's low-tech blur of fact and fiction (Of course, this being the case *only* if you weren't a hardcore film geek who hadn't seen CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST or THE LAST BROADCAST before.).
And while I still don't know what the titular BOOK OF SHADOW is supposed to be (heck, even THE PJAMA JAM made sense in the context of HOUSE PARTY 2), one thing that I am sure of is that the pendulum has firmly swung in the other direction.
BWP2 is very much at heart a pedestrian haunted house film with traditional shocks piled on like a classic case of overcompensation. Ghost children, phantom dogs, gore inserts. We've seen it all before, and it's all piled on a bit thick here. Less might have been more. But then again, that was the lesson of the original BWP...
BOOK OF SHADOWS introduces itself as a recreation of actual events that occurred after the release of BWP in 1999 (and if you believe that, I've got a slightly broken bridge in Burkittsville I'd like to sell you). After an amusing montage of actual footage of Jay Leno, Conan, Roger Ebert, and others reacting to the first film (along with some local townsfolk angered by the proliferation of lookiloo tourists) BWP2 then breaks into a standard narrative with another gang of kids venturing into the woods loaded for witch with handi-cams galore. You can learn plenty about these individuals at any number of promotional kiosks currently on display in the multiplex, or on the web, so I won't get into them here. The BIG HOOK is that the lot of them wakes up in the woods one morning missing several hours of memory. Back in a big abandoned building owned by a guy missing a few marbles (i.e. your classical haunted house setting given a modern tweak or two) video tapes -- hopefully containing footage of these lost hours -- are carefully scrutinized for answers (meanwhile, the hardcore contingent will be shouting that the franchise is now ripping off the Japanese RING films rather than Ruggero Deodato). I don't want to spoil everything that starts tumbling out, but I will say that bad things start to happen like clockwork. Dead bodies start piling up and a goth friendly heavy metal soundtrack is pumped up to volume 11.
It feels a bit over-scripted, with a serious case of "who-done-it," not entirely unlike a slightly hysterical slumber party game of (or a film called) CLUE. The performers do just fine, and are fun to watch, but the supporting players are often guilty of playing it too broadly (especially the town sheriff who's several shades too Slim Pickens).
Things go terribly awry at two key junctures: a heavy-handed drug binge set to a song by the Queens of the Stone Age which looks like an audition for a "Just Say No" spot and a preposterous multi-player sex scene right out of the EROTIC WITCH PROJECT that I think was actually meant to be scary. With humor sometimes being played up as much as horror here, it can sometime be hard to tell.
By no means is it a total washout. Clever touches do abound. A film commenting on it's predecessor's impact on the real world is a unique, amusing gimmick that is utilized wisely. The success of the first BWP is played for laughs, and the fact these gags are actually funny, even after the ten million variations of THE BOGUS WITCH PROJECT we've been forced to endure, has to be some kind of miracle. Plus the frantic pacing and constant occurances keeps the viewer firmly unbalanced and definitely dreading whatever may come next. And what more could you ask for from a horror film, really?
But the fact that BW2 isn't *all* that different from the recent re-makes of THE HAUNTING or THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL is a seriously double-edged sword. On one hand, even the skeptical will get their money's worth this go-round in time-honored scares. But whatever edge the original BWP gained over the competition from it's previous low key guerrilla approach is lost, like so many other once groundbreaking horror films ... in the woods.
Wicked Ale
