As part of the ongoing celebration of Halloween, I've decided to post my reviews of The Blair Witch Project and Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.
The Blair Witch Project: Simple, effective, creepy, and quite scary (There were a few parts that sent chils up and down my back). Perfectly captures the terror of being lost in the woods. Add onto that some seriously creepy, supernatural shit going down and you have a film that works surprisingly well. It's a plus that it moves at a pretty good clip, and doesn't overstay it's welcome. I also have to give props to the sound design which is great and effective. For a film that was only made on a budget of $60,000 (and that made a domestic gross of $140 million, worldwide total was 248 mil), I'm shocked at how well it holds up even 17 years later and at just how well made it was. The performances are believable (There are some bad lines though, not many), and the setting is a simple but terrifying. The Blair Witch Project may be the most successful film experiment I can think of, and it still stands as the best found footage horror film I've seen (They really should have stopped making found footage after this beauty). It's like a really good, scary, late night campfire story....one that I don't mind re-visiting. Naturally, it's highly recommended (There is also a good deal of shaky cam, so if you get motion sick maybe you should sit this one out....or just close your eyes when these parts happen and listen to the proceedings, trust me, you'll be just as scared).
5 STARS
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2- You can tell that there may be a good film lying in here somewhere, but the studio done fucked it up! The film is edited to shit (so many cuts to the present and the past), the characters are unlikable, and the whole thing is confusing. There are some genuinely interesting ideas here (One example: If a group believes in a fictional thing hard enough, can that fictional thing be brought to life?), and the mystery at the heart of the film is actually an intriguing one. Unfortunately, the film throws all the puzzle pieces in a jumbled heap on the table and tells you to get to it. Figuring out what's really going on is just about impossible. It's clear that the group is suffering from severe hallucinations (sometimes even shared hallucinations), and that one or more may be possessed by The Blair Witch at different times. I suppose the simple answer is that the group is slowly being driven mad by The Blair Witch (which begs the question: Was The Blair Witch real all along, did the group inadvertently bring her to life by believing in her, or have they all been driven crazy by their love of The Blair Witch Project and it's folklore?). Either way, the film leaves you with many, many questions and tons of almost answers (and the film is assembled in such a way that finding the truth is a herculean task). Hopefully one day we'll get a directors cut, but as it stands now Book of Shadows is interesting, frustrating, and maddening. On the plus side, I actually kind of dug the score and I liked the setting of the warehouse.
2.5 STARS
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