Okay. So, um, "Blair Witch 2." It didn't scare me, but it was an intriguing enough story that it didn't totally suck. Spoilers ahoy ...









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So if you watch "Shadow of the Blair Witch" on SciFi, or if you just visited the web site, then you know all about last year's Coffin Rock massacre, for which Blair Witch Hunt tour guid Jeff Patterson and two accomplices were arrested and are currently undergoing trial (note to the reality impaired: not really, it's all just the set up for the movie). So those ever helpful folks at Artisan Entertainment went over the video footage that was taken on the tour and put together a re-enactment of the events based on the footage, as well as interviews and the testimony of the accused. This re-enactment is distributed to theaters as the sequel to "The Blair Witch Project" and is titled, for reasons you'd have to read the web site to understand because they never explain it in the movie, "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2."

It starts out promisingly enough, with footage of media coverage of all of the hype surrounding the first movie, intercut with interviews with supposed Burkittsville residents, many of whom have found ways to capitalize on the fame that the faux documentary has brought to their once quiet little town. Among the latter is the movie's central character, Jeff Patterson. We are then introduced through disturbing flashback sequences to Jeff's history as a patient in a mental institution. Then the movie actually starts. Jeff has combined his Blair Witch obsession with his business acumen and started "The Blair Witch Hunt" tours, promising tourists that they will walk where the witch herself once tread.

Four people answer Jeff's internet ad, including a bitter, whiny, modern-day Wiccan who wants Elly Kedward (the Blair Witch herself) to be her mentor, a psychic goth chick who's just along because she liked the movie and she thought it would be fun, and a writer couple who are taking the tour strictly for research purposes. The five head into the woods where they set up camp among the ruins of Rustin Parr's house. Jeff sets up cameras everywhere, hoping to capture an Elly Kedward haunting on film. Just as everyone starts having fun, a rival tour group stops by, and the two groups argue over who gets to spend the night in the ruins. Jeff's group convinces the second group to camp out on Coffin Rock instead. The second group leaves, and Jeff and company begins to party.

Come daybreak, the five awaken to an inexplicably trashed campsite, with no memory of having gone to sleep. Jeff's cameras are all ruined and the writers' notes are so much confetti. The goth chick has a psychic vision that the video tapes from the cameras are still intact and hidden in the house's foundation. Jeff checks, and sure enough, there are the tapes -- in the exact same place where Heather's original film footage was supposedly found. Spooooky. The group gathers up their things and, after a brief stop off at a hospital so that one of the women in the group can finish having a miscarriage, head back to Jeff's home in an abandoned factory warehouse, where they begin to review the tapes and try to piece together what occurred during the missing five hours. Hijinks ensue.

Along the way, Jeff & co. learn that the tourists they sent to Coffin Rock were brutally murdered in what appeared to be a recreation of the original Coffin Rock Massacre that Heather told us all about in the first film. They also learn that the Sherrif, who really doesn't like Jeff at all, considers them all to be the prime suspects. Meanwhile, back at the warehouse, two members of Jeff's group die, conveniently bring the death toll to seven, once again repeating the cycle of seven deaths every forty years or so that began after Elly Kedward's banishment and was hoped to have ended with Rustin Parr's child murders. Jeff and the remaining tourists are arrested, and we, the audience, are left to wonder: Did they really do it, and they're lying, hoping to cop an insanity plea? Or did they do it, but they're telling the truth about having no memories of the murders, because the Blair Witch made them do it? Or, are they truly innocent, and the Blair Witch did it all, including tampering with their video footage to make them look guilty, thus setting them up to take the fall?

Like I said, intriguing story, nice continuance of the "legend," but aside from some eerie imagery and some gorey slice & dice shots of the massacre, it's no more unsettling than some episodes I've seen of "Unsolved Mysteries."

Which is frustrating, because it had potential. I think that where the filmmakers failed was that they didn't stick to the original formula. Presenting the film as a re-enactment of events which we already know to be fictitious made me feel too separated from the events depicted in the film to really be impacted by them. I think that if they had instead shown us the "actual footage" from Jeff & the gang's video cameras, and intercut that with their testimonies, and then left us to draw our own conclusions about what "really" happened, they could have had a hell of a scary movie, as well as a great sequel. As it was, it played like an episode of one of those paranormal investigation shows, and it just didn't do anything for me.

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