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There’s a good reason we never saw a sequel to the Zapruder film: it was a one-of-a-kind shock. In putting out a follow-up to last summer’s unbelievably profitable, undeniably original The Blair Witch Project, Artisan Entertainment is attempting something analogous to digging up JFK and shooting him again. Not that it’s the least bit surprising, since the original put them on the Hollywood map by earning a return similar to having bought Microsoft stock at $1.59 in 1980, except that their payback took only a couple months. But you can certainly infer something regarding the sequel’s quality from the fact that BWP writer/directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez* wished to have nothing to do with this return to the Burkittsville, Maryland environs other than to lend their names as executive producers (they are planning, however, to shoot a prequel exploring the 18th century origins of their mythos).
Book of Shadows (don’t expect to make any sense of the title until you’ve seen the tie-in pseudodocumentary on the Sci-Fi Channel) follows a group of truth- and thrill-seekers who hire an opportunistic online entrepreneur to take them on a camping trip to the site where Heather, Josh, and Mike’s filmed diary was found. They wind up partying their cerebellums out, only to wake up in the morning with several hours of memory missing and – they later learn – a rival tour group messily murdered nearby. Armed with their own videotapes, they retreat to the abandoned-factory home of their guide, a former mental patient, to seek out the lost-weekend mysteries. Additional weird stuff happens.
Much more violent, loud, and conventional than its precursor, Book of Shadows would still be a passable flick were it not for the inevitable comparisons. About the only thing the two have in common, other than setting, is relatively little-known actors using their real first names; this time there are no shaky-cam panic runs through the trees. The script, co-written by fledgling director Joe Berlinger and Dick Beebe (the House on Haunted Hill remake) is not wholly unintelligent (there’s a great “How many Heather Donahues does it take to screw in a light bulb? bit), sustaining a decent amount of suspense while playing a rousing game of real-unreal. And Berlinger mixes in some interesting flashback/forward/sideways scenes. But BW2, as its opening scream-metal anthem declares, is basically “disposable.” C+ *By the way, Myrick and Sanchez named their production company, Haxan Films, after a 1922 Danish horror silent which was considered so outrageous it was banned in many countries for several decades. The film, a documentary/drama/stop-motion treatise on witchcraft, finally found cult success in a 1966 rerelease featuring narration by William Burroughs…as if that would make it less disturbing.
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