The box-office success of The Blair Witch Project made a sequel inevitable. However, despite the ongoing profitability of horror franchises, most sequels to classic genre films suck. Hoping to avoid falling into this trap, the bigwigs at Artisan Entertainment made an inspired choice for the sequel’s director: Joe Berlinger, an acclaimed documentarian who co-directed with Bruce Sinofsky the excellent Brother’s Keeper (1992) and the Paradise Lost films (1996 and 2000). Surely he would turn an admittedly unnecessary and money-grubbing sequel in an interesting direction, right?
Sadly, it wasn't to be. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is not simply another in a seemingly endless line of lousy horror sequels. Tt’s practically unwatchable, easily the worst film I've watched yet for this series, which is no mean feat when you consider I've already reviewed The Serpent's Egg. The fact that I’ve had to see it twice in my life should dispel any illusions you might have that a critic’s work is glamorous.
Book of Shadows mostly ditches the faux-documentary style of the original film in favor of more conventional direction, but it still begins promisingly enough, as a take on the Blair Witch phenomenon as seen through the eyes of four Blair Witch enthusiasts visiting the film’s locations and the would-be tour guide who leads them on their journey. But after that interesting setup, the movie goes wrong. So, so very wrong.
Berlinger complained at the time of the film’s release that Artisan took the film from him, shot some new scenes, and re-cut it in order to make it more commercial. So it’s entirely possible that he’s not entirely to blame for the film’s overwhelming awfulness. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I’d guess that he probably had little say about the film’s gratuitous use of “boo!” moments, such as the brief flashbacks to the killings at the center of the story.
However, the problems with the film run far deeper than a handful of gratuitous scare tactics. For one thing, there’s the
misguided use of the old unreliable narrator trick. It’s bad enough that the protagonists of Book of Shadows all conveniently black out just before they go on their killing spree and only discover their misdeeds after they’ve discovered the video footage. But the movie can’t even decide whether video is reliable- first we’re meant to buy that the killings (and drugs’n’booze filled Wiccan orgy beforehand) happened like we see on the tapes, but then the circumstances of Tristan’s death are differ between what we’re show in the film and the video footage of the incident. Or did the Blair Witch manipulate the footage? Oooooooooh, scary!
In addition, Berlinger should bear most of the blame for the amateur hour performances by most of the cast. It's difficult to say which of the principals is most embarrassing: Jeffrey Donovan as the ex-mental patient tour guide with his repertoire of roughly three Crazy Faces, Stephen Barker Turner and Tristen Skyler as the world’s blandest couple (no mean feat in their histrionic later scenes), and late-period Woody Allen supporting player Erica Leerhsen as the foxy Wiccan whose primary qualification for the role appears to be her willingness to disrobe. Of the principal cast, only Kim Director as the requisite Goth emerges with her dignity relatively intact, largely by virtue of playing the most grounded character. And the less said about lawman Lanny Flaherty, whose jaw-dropping performance is too broad to pass inspection in a barn-door factory, the better.
But what takes Book of Shadows from the simply awful to the truly reprehensible is the way it exploits the case of the West
Memphis Three, the subject of Berlinger’s Paradise Lost films. In those films, Berlinger and Sinofsky documented the case of a group of young men who were convicted of the killings of three young children largely (in the film’s view) due to their affinity for black clothing and heavy metal music and their curiosity about witchcraft. Watching that film, one could see the sympathy the filmmakers had with these outsiders. By contrast, Book of Shadows paints its outsiders as a bunch of black-wearin’, metal-listenin’, witchcraft-lovin' crazies who are but a beer and a toke away from going a killing spree. In doing so, it essentially buys into the same anti-outsider hysteria that convicted the West Memphis Three. Near the end of Book of Shadows, as the survivors are being led into the police station, we overhear a newscaster who says the line, “sadly, as has happened so many times in this country, violent art has inspired real-life violence.” Really, Berlinger- you ought to know better.
In an uncharacteristic display of good taste- or perhaps because they were simply sick of all things Blair Witch- the moviegoing public roundly rejected Book of Shadows. The film scared up barely 20% of the original’s domestic gross, thus causing a proposed prequel to be directed by original Blair Witch filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick to be mothballed. Berlinger, no doubt smarting from his less-than-amiable flirtation with studio filmmaking, high-tailed it back to the land of documentaries, directing 2004’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster and an episode of the mammoth History Channel miniseries Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America. And Artisan Entertainment, once riding high on the success of The Blair Witch Project, struggled for a few more years before being sold to Lionsgate in 2003.
Links to previous When Good Directors Go Bad columns can be found here.