Clever, entertaining, and thought-provoking, a purely original thriller that is able to stand on its own two feet.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:103
Fresh:13
Rotten:90
Average Rating:3.4/10
Consensus: This sequel to Blair Witch Project is all formula and no creativity, mechanically borrowing elements from the original and other horror movies.
Runtime: 90 mins
Genre: Horror/Suspense
Synopsis:
Artisan Entertainment's Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 delves deeper into the legend of the infamous Blair Witch and the unspeakable evil wrought in the Black Hills near Burkittsville,...
Artisan Entertainment's Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 delves deeper into the legend of the infamous Blair Witch and the unspeakable evil wrought in the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 takes place in present-day Burkittsville, after the events chronicled in The Blair Witch Project. Four young people have signed up for a tour of the Black Hills, the latest Blair Witch-inspired moneymaker dreamed up by Jeff Patterson, a black sheep townie with a murky past. They set up camp near the foundation of the house that belonged to Rustin Parr, the old hermit who was hanged for the murders of seven children, a crime that bore the mark of the Blair Witch. In the morning, the campers awake with no memory of having gone to sleep and five hours stolen from their lives. They return to Jeff's residence, an abandoned 19th Century warehouse at the edge of Burkittsville, to try to piece together what happened.
But the strange occurrences haven't ended with that night, as legend and reality become frighteningly entwined. Bizarre symbols appear on their bodies, children's plaintive crying is heard, phantasmagoric visions confound their eyes, and fleeting apparitions suggest the villainy of the distant past. In the woods, a grisly discovery at Coffin Rock recalls a deadly chapter in the history of the Blair Witch. No longer sure what is real and what is imagined, the five young people start to unravel psychologically, eyeing one another with suspicion and edging ever closer to mass hysteria. Too late, they realize that when they left the woods, they didn't leave alone...
Starring: Tristan Skylar, Stephen Barker Turner, Jeffrey Donovan, Kim Director
Starring: Tristan Skylar, Stephen Barker Turner, Jeffrey Donovan, Kim Director, Erica Leerhsen, Lanny Flaherty
Director: Joe Berlinger
Director: Joe Berlinger
Screenwriter: Jon Bokenkamp, Neal Marshall
Producer: Daniel Myrick, Bill Carraro
Studio: Artisan Entertainment
Reviews for Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
[The] tendency to cannibalize and sample from other horror flicks, made popular by the Scream series, is worse than dull. It's parasitic.
Not only is it an illogical, nastily violent affair full of stock characters and slasher-movie tactics, but it's a sequel to a movie that absolutely needed no sequel in the first place.
While Berlinger is acclaimed as a documentary filmmaker, his skills at fiction filmmaking is less than adequate.
This is industrial Hollywood at its worst -- a studio throwing together a cheap, thoughtless, self-referential quickie that betrays virtually everything about the spirit of its predecessor.
Unfortunately, Berlinger has chosen to 'go Hollywood' with his first theatrical feature, which plays more like Wes Craven's Scream 3 than what it should.
Laced with just enough intelligence and originality to modestly recommend it.
Book of Shadows isn't going to scare anyone except the bean counters at Artisan who are counting on a big financial return.
Creating a movie that virtually everyone can hate is no small accomplishment. But filmmaker Joe Berlinger may just have pulled it off.
The real problem here may be that Blair Witch 2 was made simply -- and only -- because Blair Witch made a lot of money.
A dull, pointless movie that only serves to cash in on the name of the first film.
This woefully bad horror film deserves the rudest treatment possible.
Isn't particularly frightening unless one considers how horrible a piece of filmmaking -- in nearly every sense of the definition -- it really is.
A decent psychological mystery filled with paranoia and delusions, which messes with your head and demands that you keep thinking about it, even after you've left the theatre.
The movie's various subplots, flashbacks and hallucinations are tripping all over each other.
As horror sequels go, it's still better than the rest of the slop out there (aside from Scream 2), but compared to the original, it's a whopping disappointment.
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