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In some ways, you have to feel sorry for the "indie" sensibility as difficult as it is to straddle the endlessly besieged margins of the mainstream. I remember how daunting the task was in high school as people discovered music only to be forced to publicly renounce it as their bands committed the ultimate sin of failing to erect tariffs or other such barriers between the cool and the uncool. Selling out is frequently the mantra of people who actually believe that you can somehow get a leg up on your fellow man by consuming differently. It’s kinda like this T-shirt that I want to wear if ever I’m famous. It will say "Your Whore on my Terms."
I wish it were as easy as saying that the Blairwitch franchise "sold out" as contradictory as a statement about the integrity of gimmicky B-movie flick would be. No, the levels of sucking reached by Book of Shadows rise far above and beyond the call of duty normally associated with creative hostile takeover by some evil corporate conglomerate. I mean, even Robin Williams is still entertaining in the trailers. . . sometimes. My friend and film commiserater, Jessica, said it best when ten minutes into the film she turned to me and said "Zoinkies, Shaggy, is that the Mystery Machine?"
It would be fruitless for all involved to try acquaint you with the mirage of a plot presented in Book of Shadows, but suffice it is to say that a group of twentysomethings find themselves in the grip of nebulous evil forces. Nebulous is a good way to describe the impish children, ricocheting possessions, and the now ambiguously drawn Blair Witch. Apparently, the film’s pagan luminary tells us, she was persecuted by the local children for being single or having an acoustic guitar or some such thing. Wasn’t the evil in the first movie an actual killer or his ghost? No matter, any evil is all evil, and it’s just as well not to throw milk in the mud and add continuity to the already struggling McScript.
The cast of Book of Shadows reads like the playbook for any and all snarky postmodern stabs at a genre. (because we all know that being tongue in cheek is a sign of intelligence rather than just a dearth of vision.) Jeff, the asylum reject and tour director, provided the market mechanism I like to call the "that one guy" syndrome, where celebrity knockoffs are used to lure the dented consumer. See, Jeff looks kinda like the film student dork from the successful Scream movies which means that someone wandering around stoned amongst advertising posters or leafing through a magazine might see a picture and say "Hey, it’s that one guy." Skee Ulrich is the pinnacle of "that one guy" marketing since he resembles bona fide supah hottie, Johnny Depp. Erica, the Wiccan whinestress, manages to play on the screen like a protracted Tori Amos interview: grueling, befuddling, and rife with shallow depth. Kim, the bitter Goth bad girl, is positively draining by reminding of us of those among us who feign persecution so that they don’t have to acknowledge other people’s genuine indifference to them. It’s 2000; Goth chicks are just rude people with ill-advised make up. Stephen and Tristen are the film’s gen-X piñatas, grad students with a grating intellectualism and a baby on the way, attributes that we’ve come to expect as fodder for the indie axiom: you can condemn other people based on their lack of your misery. We hate them. We’re supposed to. They represent the life with the little "l" that we fear, the sense that all our idiosyncrasies can be engulfed in the relatively banal life patterns offered in contemporary consumer culture. My friend Jessica told me that, on the bright side, at least some unknown actors got paid. The flipside of that is that someone more talented could have been instead. It’s this motley cast of obviously broken people who stumble with brute idiocy into the face of the Supernatural. At least in the 80s people seemed to make some effort to do battle with evil, some primal struggle to remain unhacked to pieces. When people die in horror movies now, you’re not terrified or upset or even entertained, you’re usually just happy to see the characters eliminated for their international crimes against personality.
Sadly, the scares were few and far between. A few blurry kids randomly appearing, flickering splices of orgy violence and characters slipping in and out of possession, providing the film’s only moments of character range. As far as I could tell none of the scares were events that couldn’t be reproduced with a joint and some Stoli. The stream of conscious violence montage couldn’t have been more ridiculous especially the sequence of Erica dancing naked around a tree that could have been lifted straight out of Showgirls. Without any atmospheric context, the images may as well have been a music video, since they were in fact set to some dark, alt metal dirges. In The Shining, the mere image of the tricycle, the girls holding hands, the tub, was enough to make your blood run chill. And it’s not just some sort of old maternal truism that you get more with a little leg than you do crotchless panties. In Blairwitch the images are either pure technique or vaguely evocative references to an endless past of horror film tropes. Any respect for the genre that could have been was left in the same shitter marked "audience enjoyment". My God, we’re not all undecided voters!
Maybe I’m just missing "the point" as I often do with the avant gaard or the independent slant of it all. You see, maybe it’s the whole point that the acting sucked, that the story sucked, that the movie managed to skim every cliché from the worst contemporary film and come out a boring, hyper-kinetic drone. But like the blank canvas in the museum, what enjoyment is there other than being one of the people who "gets" it. I’d rather be dumber and have higher expectations.
So the movie ends with our remaining characters, and you truly wish there weren’t any, facing the legal recrimination of a night of possession or a bout with Rufees, one is never quite sure which. It’s in those moments of interrogation, where the movie about the movie is supposed to be climaxing that you realize that you’ve picked the shell without the ball under it, again. Blairwitch 2 proves the time-honored truism: let no good idea go unwasted.
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