FFWD Weekly
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Film by Jaime Frederick There are two ways to approach Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. Unfortunately, neither of them will make it a film worth watching. Not surprisingly, as a sequel to last year’s The Blair Witch Project, the film, not surprisingly, fails to achieve the terror or the technical mastery of the original. As a film by accomplished documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper and Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills), it is a total disappointment. In many ways, Berlinger seems like the perfect choice to direct this project. Given the huge media circus that savvy filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick and their distributor’s marketing staff had created with The Blair Witch Project, the prospects for an interesting sequel were dubious at best – rather, it seemed that this was conceived as one giant cash-in for Sanchez and Myrick, listed here as executive producers. But Berlinger’s experience examining the media and public superstition during the making of Paradise Lost should have prepared him for the fact that elements of the Blair Witch story had become confounded in the public imagination by a brilliant Internet marketing scheme – it’s hard to believe, but many of the less skeptical audience members who watched The Blair Witch Project were convinced they were seeing actual documentary footage taken by three people who had gone missing in the Maryland woods. Paradise Lost, which Berlinger co-directed with Bruce Sinofsky, relates the story of three teenagers from West Memphis, Arkansas, who were accused of murdering three younger boys – the teens were ultimately convicted and at least one is still on death row. Despite their convictions, the film questioned their guilt and suggested it had been convenient for local authorities to use the teens as scapegoats for the crimes because they dressed in black and listened to heavy metal. Due to his involvement with an uncompromising documentary that exposed flaws in the American criminal justice system, it seemed natural that Berlinger might take a similarly exploratory approach with his first "fiction" feature. In fact, Berlinger, along with co-screenwriter Dick Beebe, has attempted to play off the fact that many people believed the legend of the Blair Witch might be corroborated by historical record. Following the opening of the film last year, the town of Burkittsville, Maryland, where the film was set, was overrun by hundreds of tourists curious about the veracity of the film’s content. Book of Shadows imagines that a group of five such individuals participating in a tour of the "haunted" woods could be overcome by hysteria and engage in some horrific activities themselves. You can practically feel Berlinger straining at the conventions of the horror genre, including some of those established by the original film. He’s trying to say something intelligent and unique about the nature of evil, and the fact that people can develop psychological barriers that allow them to commit heinous acts without being aware that they are doing so. There are also subtexts about the way the media distorts the nature of reality in the way they report on events. Berlinger even manages to work in a commentary about the manner in which the original film, like many horror films, misrepresented the Wiccan religion – this is fairly unsophisticated stuff that shows Berlinger gives even less credit to his audience than Sanchez and Myrick gave to theirs (at least they delivered a genuinely white-knuckle horror flick). Ultimately, Blair Witch 2 is undermined by the flaw that brings down so many films, and that is the uniformly terrible acting from all concerned. Granted, some of these relative newcomers are worse than others but the fact that none of them deliver the goods probably signifies a shortcoming in Berlinger’s direction. I mean, even the ghosts are lousy. Chalk it up to his inexperience with actors but while the director has conceived a most ambitious film, without the support of a talented cast, there’s no hope for his big ideas to have much effect at all.

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