MOVIE REVIEWS Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)

• Directed by Joe Berlinger
• complete credits: see IMDb entry

• Review

Buy Related - amazon.com  DVD · VHS · Album · Score

Bad to the Bone

Rating: 10 of 10        

It must have seemed an impossible task to do a sequel to 'The Blair Witch Project', a movie deriving its energy mostly from posing to be a documentary instead. The hoax, the buildup, the hype, however, all this had to stay a singular experience: For you simply cannot repeat something which is simply singular per se. And a 'normal' movie as a sequel, who would have wanted that? So the endeavor, to me, had to seem quite pointless - and I was only mildly excited as I entered the cinema, having read some bad reviews about it. I was wrong - luckily. What I got instead was probably one of the very best horror films I've seen till today - and I've seen a lot.

Horror nowadays has a very strange problem: It has become popular. Nothing wrong with that? Usually I'd tend to agree. But popularity mostly leads to a general softening and smoothening of a phenomenon - as something gets accepted by a larger audience, it will be judged by this larger audience, meaning, it loses its niche position and is subjected to a very different process of opinion-making than before. If horror is only watched by a handful of people, i.e. those used to it, it can be much more drastic - but once the audience gets larger, the stakes - money-wise - are higher, so you don't want to alienate your audience. That's the classic conflict between independent and studio productions. That doesn't mean that there can't be good studio-produced movies, on the contrary, yet nothing beats the independence you get with, well, independent productions. There's yet another factor: Money. Studio productions can be larger, thus enabling a greater use of effects. That may be good for action movies, but it can be a death blow for a decent horror film: For horror can work best when it's done subtly and less directly: Once you show the monster in full, once you expose it, it's over, the thrill is gone.

Today, horror is all over movies and television. Older shows like The Twilight Zone and the (more or less lately) revived Outer Limits are rather clinging towards a mixture between horror and sf, aiming for an obvious moral message. But it has been Twin Peaks to start today's horror wave, with The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer - as well as their spin-offs, Millennium and Angel - delivering horror to a larger audience, so that there's plenty of monsters you could get used to. Yet that's just the tip of the iceberg. All of these are the good shows, the flagships, so to say, well-versed in storytelling and mixing horror with humor. There's nothing wrong with that, they rather exploit the cult than the cult exploits them, and they are still able to be creative, the active shows that is. But all the other stuff, Poltergeist, Profiler, Psi Factor, Charmed, even Sabrina the Teenage Witch - all these are rather created by the cult, they are either too dark or too pointless to count. This, of course, is a highly subjective analysis - but I reckon that none of these would survive if the big ones died. Horror may seem popular, but true horror is still a fragile construction - illustrated by the death of Millennium. Yet not even that's my point. Elements of horror, or mimicking the big horror shows, can nowadays be found even where they are rather not suspected to exist, like in JAG, Star Trek: Voyager or even Ally McBeal. Movies like 'Scream' posing as "scary movies" are anything but scary, yet they have made horror a hip phenomenon, or rather, what they consider to be horror. That's partly what I meant by smoothening, and even John Carpenter, the otherwise justly so called "master of horror" has given us such a strange creature as 'Vampires'. The more refreshing it is to - finally - once again have a movie which deserves to be called a horror film - a movie which doesn't care if it's too smart, too incomprehensible for the average redneck, a movie which is bloody and ugly and simply bad to the bone.

The first Blair Witch movie was about a group of kids going into the woods searching for some ancient myth, being totally unprepared both mentally and in terms of equipment. The end left the audience guessing. Part two now is sort of a continuation - now without the handheld video camera, without the cheap feeling, without the mockumentary character. Yet the premise is the same. Part one fucked with people's minds, part two does the same - only on another, less obvious level. This is a "real" movie, with a soundtrack - which is extraordinary, to say the least - and filmed with the help of a movie camera and lots of sfx and vfx stuff to make it real, not giving away too much, however. You still have strands of the mockumentary background running through it, so the sequel is rather a continuation than a rip-off, taking the original concept to a different level. This time, the crew is better equipped, larger, more experienced. Yet this can be a disadvantage, too - and of course, something gets wrong. Yet this is not your ordinary slasher flick, it's horror - maybe that's what some reviewers don't understand. Horror happens inside of you - it's not big blobby monsters hopping around, it's psychological. You'll know what I mean once you see it.

This movie is a reminder that the topic of horror is nothing nice, nothing comfortable, nothing to go to bed with at night. It is about confronting an audience used to smoothened fairy tales with the real ugliness which lies beneath the surface of things - and it follows the post-modern attack against the conventional perception of reality. And it is about deriding this utterly ridiculous notion that science and the scientific method would be able to finally unmask the unexplained. Reality is far more complex, and if seen from this movie's perspective, you better watch out. Some things are not what they seem to be.

December 9th, 2000