Hey folks, Harry here... and I hate to have to be the bearer of this... Especially since I'm a huge fan of both the original film and Joe Berlinger's documentary work... but dear lord this sounds awful... Of course, ya have to realize that when the original came out... it had its detractors... but the trailer I saw gave me the fears that this review seem to be confirming. I hope the Lurker In The Woods is wrong... but I've got a baaaaad feeling about this one... Here ya go...
Harry,
Call me the Lurker in the Woods. I went to a press screen of BLAIR WITCH 2 in Europe. It was a print literally fresh out of the lab, with final colour timing not complete, nor credits on the end-reel yet, but it was the first time the film was shown to press.
I'm sorry to say that BLAIR WITCH 2 is the worst sequel since EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, and makes about as much sense. Everything that the first movie did right, BLAIR WITCH 2 does horribly, tragically, spectacularly WRONG. This movie pretty much ties BATTLEFIELD: EARTH for Worst Movie of 2000. It is going to bomb like Fat Man over Hiroshima.
MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD
I'm sure everyone who's been keeping up with the movie knows the premise by now: it's a year after the original movie, and Burkitsville has become a tourist hotspot for Blair Witch pilgrims. The story follows one particular group who venture to the old house where the first movie ended, and emerge the next morning with three hours from that night unaccounted for... but they have videotapes of the entire night. The rest of the movie is about them trying to unravel the riddle.
Then they realize they brought something back with them.
All the above is well and good, if it weren't for the fact that the script is incompetently written, coming off like a fucked-up attempt to write SCOOBY DOO. The movie starts by being, like, oh-so-postmodern by having the characters go on commenting on the first movie and the merchandising that came out of it and the cottage industries. And the characters are utterly superficial, self-conscious representations of Modern Youth: the Wiccan girl, the slacker tour guide with a history of mental problems, the goth psychic wannabe, the po-mo academic couple out to write a book. Unfortunately, the screenwriters are utterly incapable of writing characters who behave in believeable -- HUMAN -- ways, and therefore loses the audience very early on in the film.
And it goes downhill from there.
The script is so incompetent that every plot element and hint are glaring and we spotted them coming a mile off. Once the characters get out of the forest and gather in an old broom-factory-turned-loft with video equipment to decipher the videotypes, the movie pretty much stops dead in its tracks for the rest of the running time. It gets repetitive, with too many badly-shot and edited-in flashes that enabled us to figure out what the hell happened during the vanished three hours, so we just slump in our seats in boredom, waiting for the characters to catch up. Cheesily-shot gore with not-very-believeable blood and gore effects are thrown in. Hallucinations and possession are thrown in. Hell, it feels like even the kitchen sink was thrown in. The cute Wiccan hotty gets naked *a lot* but by that time, even the audience is too comatose from boredom to get excited.
And Joe Berliner may have made documentaries like PARADISE LOST and PARADISE LOST 2, but he proves himself woefully lost at sea here: the actors are mainly from TV, at least half of them have been on THE X-FILES -- and I don't remember their names because there weren't any press kits at the screening -- and they're left to try to act out characters who have no real motivation and whose reactions MAKE NO FUCKING SENSE WHATSOEVER... this is made worse by the evidence that Berliner either didn't direct them or merely told them to get more and more hysterical in the hopes that their twitchiness might make us care about them. Sorry dude, it's hard to care about characters who are no more than cardboard cut-outs.
Is the film scary? No. Because you need to care about the characters and what might happen to them. Since these aren't believeable characters, the film plops down dead like a damp squib about twenty minutes in and proceeds to stay there for the rest of the ninety minutes, oozing into a rather messy puddle and starting to smell increasingly bad.
The only thing that kept going through my mind while watching this was: WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?! Watching BLAIR WITCH 2 was like having a mental douche. Your mind feels oddly cleansed afterwards. My friend disagreed with me, though. He was deeply pissed off that he'd wasted ninety minutes of his life sitting through this Thanksgiving turkey that arrived early.
Do yourself a favour: avoid this one.
