What The Film!? – The Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

What The Film?! is a weekly column exclusive to Under The Gun Review that brings to light the plot holes Hollywood hoped you’d never notice. Written by comedy writer Dane Sager, this column shows no mercy to films that try and pull the proverbial wool over our eyes.

If you know a film with major plot holes that you feel needs to be exposed, tell us! Email utgjames@gmail.com with the subject “What The Film” and we’ll try to get your suggestion featured on the site.

This Week’s Movie: 1999’s The Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

Okay, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to think back to this “found footage” genre, back to where it began, where this trend originated from. What movie are you thinking of? “1980’s Cannibal Holocaust?” Okay, nevermind, instead I want you to think about the first movie to do that format and not have it come off as some gorey exploitation flick. “1998’s The Last Broadcast?” Guys, come on. This is so easy. Think about the shakey camera genre. What’s the massive super successful one? “2008’s Cloverfield?”

God damn it, you guys. Try harder.

1999’s The Blair Witch Project is one of the most successful movies ever made. The ratio of money spent to money earned is astronomical. It revolutionized the entire industry, making more and more indie movies brought to the spotlight. To put it lightly, The Blair Witch Project was groundbreaking in its execution and production. If you were to read the production of it, you’d be surprised that they managed to get a movie out of the mess at all, let alone a great one.

Buy it on BluRay? No. This movie needs to be seen on VHS.

Think about the horror movies of the 1990s; you have the Scream series, the I Know What You Did series. Friday the 13th was still chugging along, so was Hellraiser, From Dusk Till Dawn had all three entries in the 1990s, and Child’s Play 4: Bride of Chucky came out the exact same year as The Blair Witch Project. You really need to look at the tone and style of its contemporaries in order to truly understand what made The Blair Witch Project so popular and successful. Nothing compared to it because it was so visceral and real, free from meddling from studios. This movie was made by passionate individuals who banded together to create something to be proud of, it was everything that the same typical Hollywood bullshit wasn’t.

There are four movies in the Urban Legend franchise but there’s no sequel to 2004’s The Incredibles. :(

Artisan Entertainment, the studio that distributed The Blair Witch Project wanted to rush into a sequel immediately, to strike while the iron was hot. The original film makers wanted to wait for the buzz and hype to die down, to really make a worthy sequel. They were let go and Artisan decided to make the movie without them.

The movie takes place with the first movie being fictional (or is it?) and a group of college kids arrive at Burkittsville, Maryland to film their own documentary in the same woods. If this sounds familiar, it’s because thirteen years later, 2011’s Grave Encounters used this same plot line for its 2012 sequel Grave Encounters 2, except it was done by the same people that did the first movie and it was done well rather than shittily.

There were also a series of Blair Witch video games, because a crappy sequel wasn’t enough of a rushed cash-in.

The movie opens with Jeff, played by Burn Notice‘s Jeffery Donovan, in a psychiatric ward, where he’s being abused by the staff. Staff are shown smoking while passing out medication and performing tests on Jeff, because to hell with science and accuracy. This sequence evolves into Jeff being interrogated by the police, where he recites back to them what occurred.

Not only does he do a great job being charismatic and crazy, he also looks as if he listens to Deftones way too much.

All of the characters are introduced; a wiccan, a psychic, and a couple who are making a book on the Blair Witch. All of these characters dress so incredibly Hot-Topic that they make the Queen of the Damned cast seem conservative. While on a tour of the locations of the first movie, each character goes out of their way to make them unlikable. Tristen, the female side of the couple writing a book is pregnant and drinking, while the psychic and the wiccan freak out over every detail, talking about the occult with the same type of rambling nonsense that 1990s movies used whenever characters talked about technology.

“They’re hacking my life! Firewalls and gigaflops and tweet-poking!”

“This baby” Jeff says excitedly, picking up a camera “records a frame a second time-lapse, so if anything comes in for a quick visit, we’re going to catch it!” Yes, because that’s exactly what that means. “Video never lies, but film does!” Another gem from Jeff that doesn’t make any sense. This whole sequence occurs while everyone is getting drunk around the fire (to Nickelback, no joke) and talk about what the Blair Witch means to them. Surprisingly, this sequence takes all the one dimensional characters, and makes them even more one dimensional. They become flatter than pre-Galileo Earth.

The group wakes up the next morning to find that all the cameras have been destroyed, that the Blair Witch book rough draft had been shredded, and Tristen had miscarried. Stephen, her boyfriend becomes worried, but absolutely didn’t give a shit when his wife was drinking to excess and smoking everything she could find the night prior.

The group ends up retiring to Jeff’s old warehouse-turned-loft that’s oddly similar to his living situation on Burn Notice. The group goes over the footage from the night prior, finding single frame flashes of various “spooky” things as well as Erica, the wiccan, spinning around a tree naked. “I need to redigitize this at a higher resolution” Jeff remarks, trying to figure out what’s really going on with the tape. Erica doesn’t take this too well, retreating to a room where she cries and prays, disappearing the next morning.

The whole movie cuts between Jeff, Kim, and Stephen being interrogated, showing them trying to explain the markings on their bodies that are no longer there, because that’s totally a logical piece of evidence. This is where it’s revealed that another Blair Witch tour group they bumped into the night they spent in the woods had been murdered and Jeff and his group are the top suspects.

“The first thing a spy learns is how to deal with murder charges. As a spy, I tend to kill a lot of people.”

They decide to watch the tapes again, this time the missing time has been returned. As it turns out, after getting drunk and messed up on drugs, the entire group destroyed all the cameras and the book notes before running off with machetes except for Tristen, who apparently orchestrated everything. Stephen kills her.

The last scene is the three survivors continuing their interrogation, being shown all the footage from the past few days which has been completely different from what we’ve seen in the movie where everyone killed everyone and Tristen wasn’t involved at all. Ambiguous? Yes. Poorly done? Absolutely. The Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is the exact opposite of the original movie, becoming the big budgeted corporate beast of a movie that the first movie fought against and won. Not only that, but Joe Berlinger, the director of the movie has gone on record that his first cut was more ominous and ambiguous, but that Artisan re-shot and re-edited the movie to make it more “traditional.” For some strange unknown reason, Artisan created a sequel that was the same type of crap that made the original so popular and endearing. It’s not an awful movie, it’s just one that was rushed out to cash in on how great the first one. You can’t help but compare it to its predecessor, which ultimately damns this movie even more. If Jeffery Donovan wasn’t in this, I would have most likely stopped it halfway through. Worst part? There is absolutely no “Book of Shadows” in this movie, that title has absolutely nothing to do with this movie.

Wouldn’t be Blair Witch if they didn’t include this shot.

Dane’s Twitter handle has everything to do with him! His Tumblr name doesn’t really. You can follow him on Twitter and Tumblr!

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