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DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 1, No. 22 HALLOWEEN SPECIAL |
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BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2 |
What a revolting development! Those 'Blair Witch' guys sell out!
By
JOHN STANLEY
of TheColumnists.com
I GOT to ruminating the other matinee about how strange it is that some things belong to a very special time and place, and are of no particular importance to later generations, when they become but obscure footnotes in the history of our popular culture.
Take Tom Loughlin and a character he played called Billy Jack. There was a time in 1974 when the "Billy Jack Phenomenon" shook up the world of movie distribution. Loughlin, in a contemptuous eschewing (and screwing?) of the movie distribution system, rented theaters across America (on a basis of what was called "four-walling" by Variety and the Hollywood Reporter) and made a fortune distributing his own movie about a half-breed Indian, who was supposed to symbolize the suppressed minorities of America, and who stood for peace and justice even if he did resort to a lot of violence before the movie was over.
"Billy Jack" made so much money that Loughlin did it a second time with "The Trial of Billy Jack," another money maker. These two films were once the talk of Hollywood and of the ever-changing evolution of how movies are made and placed into theaters.
Today it's unlikely the public would give a damn about Loughlin's half-breed, and would laugh its head off at the portrayals and the plots he dreamed up. As it turned out, four-walling really didn't become a big trend and the strong distributors and studios held reign over the power of movie distribution. Loughlin kept on making lousier movies (including a big-budget remake of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," called "Billy Jack Goes to Washington," which never had a national run in theaters) and soon was no longer a symbolic threat to the Establishment of Hollywood, an oxymoron if ever there was one.
The reason I got to thinking about "everything has its time and place" is because of the release of "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2," the sequel to last summer's phenomenal hit "The Blair Witch Project," which grossed something like $250 million. When the original hit theaters in the summer of 1999, it struck with the same kind of resounding impact that "Billy Jack" had made on the minds that then ran (or thought they ran) Hollywood.
"Blair Witch" had been made for pocket change, enhanced greatly by an imaginative website that created pre-release sensation and fan excitement. Suddenly everyone and his monkey's uncle was using the Internet to promote their forthcoming movies in ways previously undreamed of, and every would-be hack in movieland was contemplating how to cash in the way that "Blair" creators Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick had cashed in so successfully with a movie that had been made for next to nothing.
I've come to the conclusion that, like "Billy Jack," the "Blair Witch" craze is another "time and place" fade that in a few years will be another footnote, just as Tom Loughlin is today. A sequel is always the challenging follow-up to success, a challenge that is rarely met. In the case of "Book of Shadows," a title that is never clearly explained, the film turns its back on that which made the original seem different and delves into all-too-familiar blood-and-gore territory. In short, the guys sold out to make a commercial film that looks like any other B-movie horror film.
Here's my take on why the first "Blair Witch" hit a nerve in young audiences and made it such a cult hit: Sanchez and Myrick decided to rely on "the theater of the mind," that region of the human imagination that allowed listeners to old-time radio of the '30s and '40s to supply all the gory details and ugly characters. As they used to do while listening to "Inner Sanctum Mysteries" and "Lights Out" and "Quiet Please." Creatures of dread and forbidding were just off to the side of the microphone, it seemed.
In the case of "Blair Witch," the monsters were always just out of camera range. Some of the film's scariest moments take place within only a black frame (a videocamera rolling unattended in the dead of night) filling the screen and a voice expressing total fear of what's out there. Listen to the monologue of a young woman lost and alone in the middle of a haunted forest: "We've ended up hungry, cold and hunted. I'm scared to close my eyes. Or open them." It worked because our minds filled in what Sanchez and Myrick didn't fill in. They understood the concept, and they got rich from it. But when you get into the big-time in Hollywood, personal concepts often get thrown to the wind, and souls sell out for even more money.
"Book of Shadows" is like hundreds of horror films I've had to review for "The Creature Features Movie Guide." It's the old "Friday the Thirteenth" concept, where you have a handful of young characters trapped in an isolated place and terrorized by a force of evil. Whether it's a slasher-killer in a mask or a monster or a supernatural force, it comes out the same. People die off one by one. Nobody is in control of his or her destiny.
In this "Blair Witch" sequel, there's just one thing that drives the plot. The supernatural force surrounding the Blair Witch legend is capable of anything. It can make people think they didn't do things they really did. It can make people think they did things they didn't really do. It can change images put on videotape. It can manipulate the truth any way it likes. That leaves hapless humans incapable of doing anything, and that's about all you have in this movie. That and a promising beginning premise that quickly evaporates away.
Jeff Donovan plays an enthusiastic though eccentric tour guide named Jeff who takes fans of "The Blair Witch Project" on a tour of the sites of the original movie. There's Erica Leerhsen playing a young woman named Erica, there's Stephen Barker Turner playing Erica's lover (who's named Stephen), there's Tristen Skylar playing another woman on the trip, and there's Kim Director as the strangest character of all, a young woman named Kim who looks like she's auditioning to replace Vampira or hopes that Elvira will soon move over. All in black, with black hair and black make-up. Kim, in fact, is the only mildly interesting character in this whole movie.
It's useless to anaylze this sequel further. It's nowhere near what the original was, proving that Sanchez and Wyrick should have stayed with their grass-roots concept.
One last observation. I was startled to see the name Joe Berlinger pop up as director. I've met Berlinger and he's an excellent documentary film maker who made "Brother's Keeper" and the two "Paradise" films about the child murders in the Robin Hood Hills of Arkansas. Why he would abandon his excellent glimpses into American violence and injustice to direct a routine horror film escapes me. Another example of a sellout for big bucks?
"The
Blair Witch Project" may have had excellent pseudo-documentary
touches, but this sequel does not. Berlinger resorts to the same
old camera angles and techniques of the rest of the Hollywood
hacks. A big talent wasted, for sure.
© 2000 by John Stanley
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