This should be the poster child movie against sequels. The whole thing looked like it was thrown together by a die hard Tarantino fan who just can't seem to edit worth a flip. The entire "supposedly scary" part of the movie is nothing more than shock value flash inserts accompanied by a loud shriek in the soundtrack. The acting is "ok", but not great. The music score is distracting in virtually every scene it is used in and the "soundtrack" is forced into the script for marketing purposes of selling a compilation album. Then there's the ending. I won't give it away, but I will say that it is a complete letdown and just plain stupid. Although I didn't think the first Blair Witch was all that great, the charm and style of the original is completely lost in this one.

There is absolutely not one scary part about this flick. It is very slow paced and overall quite boring. Expect this one to DIE after Halloween weekend.

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SPOILERS AHEAD! SPARE YOURSELF AND READ THEM!!!

The beginning starts out interestingly with the Blair Witch hoax and the publicity it's drawn to the simple town of Burkewitteville or something or other. Some of the townfolk get into it, some regret the first film ever being make. But tourists everywhere flock to these woods that contain the modern mythos. And the film humbly takes potshots at the first film's inconsistencies (except for the obvious one where the three filmmakers could have just followed the creek's trail out of the woods).

Then we're introduced to the characters -- The Video freak (who makes a comment about film that will less than thrill the die hard emulsion fans of this site), the Psychic Necrophiliac, the Wiccan, and the two Researchers completing a suitable crew for some Blair Witch mischief. We are led to the original spot where the film's footage was supposedly found. The foreshadowing with the hideous tree that wasn't always there was kind of cool. The film's pace slows down abit when they all drink and become raucous (more so later on that night as we will find out after enduring the bulk of this shitty film). The next morning, we find that something happened, but all our characters have no recollection of the night before. Only the tapes, placed appropriately in the original spot where the footage from the first film was found, can offer them insight into what occurred. Now the filmmakers have paved the way for a real good show, maybe even better than the original (which wouldn't have been that hard). But they stray from the path. And they do it badly.

Our characters receive strange rashes that are never explained, they see things that are incongruous to the story, we are subjected to inserts at the sheriff's interrogation room that throw us off, and the prospect of a good show with all the promising ingredients (peacing together their amnesia through the tapes, the dead tourist group, the unexplained rashes, and the isolation of the characters in this Psycho Video Freak's fortress) are muddled up with bad hallucinations, crappy editing, and stupid lines of dialogue. The actors are good, but they have a horrible script to work with. The only one I really enjoyed watching though was the Video Freak.

We never find out what Book of Shadows means, and the explanations of what the characters were really doing versus what they all thought they were doing was beyond disappointment. But if you've stayed through the movie this long to find that out, disappointment is an all too familiar feeling. In fact, the last line of dialogue spoken in the film sums up the ending, as well as the movie as a whole, to Blair Witch 2 perfectly. "This is fucking bullshit!"

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