Unhappily, her mail-order business hasn't worked out it's too expensive to ship rocks by UPS.Īmong the Burkittsville entrepreneurs we meet is a blithe stoner dude named Jeff (Jeffrey Donovan), who insists that the legend of the Blair Witch is legitimate despite all the "naysayers who come and say nay." As "Book of Shadows" settles down, we learn that Jeff has spent time in a psychiatric hospital and that his new venture is leading tourists into the Black Hills in a van emblazoned with "Blair Witch Hunt" logos. One resident has begun selling both Blair Witch-style wooden stick figures and "genuine" Black Hills rocks (from her backyard). Residents have learned to dress nicely when fetching the mail, as they're likely to be recorded on video by passing motorists.
#Blair witch 2 movie#
The 1999 release of "The Blair Witch Project" has transformed the rural hamlet of Burkittsville, Md., where the movie was filmed. None of this is one-fifth as original as Berlinger and co-writer Dick Beebe seem to think it is, but much of it is amusing and crisply handled. He's followed by Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien and Roger Ebert, and immediately we know where we are: the much-traveled realm of self-referential media satire. The next image we see is that of Kurt Loder, the MTV News anchor, discussing the then-burgeoning "Blair Witch" phenomenon. The opening titles read: "This is a fictionalized re-enactment of events occurring after the release of 'The Blair Witch Project.'" While "The Blair Witch Project" opened by insisting that its story was true, "Book of Shadows" begins by acknowledging that it isn't, or at least hedging the question.
Instead of a fake documentary made by a couple of film-school prodigies, "Book of Shadows" is a straightforward fiction film made by a documentarian (with a few bits and pieces of actual documentary). The general public, I imagine, will take a curious peek over the next couple of weeks, and turn away with a shrug.Įntrusting the "Blair Witch" sequel to Joe Berlinger, co-director of such brooding documentaries as "Brother's Keeper" and "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills," was at the very least an interesting gamble. (Think "Scream" meets "sex, lies, & videotape" crossed with "Fight Club," although all those films are surer afoot than this one.) Genre fans will appreciate the bravery of the struggle, along with the references to "The Exorcist," "The Omen," "Evil Dead" and other classics. It's a movie fighting a battle it can't win, attempting to escape its destiny as an ordinary horror film, albeit one with a mild dose of postmodern whimsy and the ghost of a social conscience. So I guess that makes "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2," for all its ingenious efforts to deconstruct and reconstruct itself, a footnote to a footnote. By now the original "Blair Witch" film already seems like an intriguing footnote to movie history, rather than the birth of a new sensibility or a new mode of production.
How do you follow up a fluke? Not only was "The Blair Witch Project" a one-time-only cult phenomenon, simultaneously exploiting general bewilderment about the supernatural, the Web and the truthfulness of documentary-style video, but the cult disappeared almost as quickly as it blossomed.
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