Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)

[inactiveuser501 168]

I really don't know what to make of this movie. It has wonderfully bad characters, and balls-out crazy moments, yet it still felt underwhelming. You could spend hours talking about Erica the Witch, the goth chick, and the Town Sheriff who serves as a foil to the Witch Hunters. Add in the fact that the original Blair Witch Directors STILL wanted to do a third sequel, yet have it ignore this movie, makes this a train wreck of epic proportions.

[RyanSz 3140]

They really tried to get movie within a movie on this one. It's a movie about "real people" who watched a "movie about real people" and it never looked back. It's like Inception for goth retards.

[seanotron 2307]

Found footage movies seem to spawn particularly bad sequels.

[RyanSz 3140]

Found footage movies seem to spawn particularly bad sequels.

 

I'm still trying to understand how you can have The Last Exorcism Part 2 if the first one was meant to be the last. Although I heard the first sequel to .REC was pretty decent, and the sequel to V/H/S looks promising.

[inactiveuser501 168]

Paranormal Activity 5 is this October, you guys. Realize we could be on Blair Witch 8 if this was a hit

[RyanSz 3140]

What's funny is that Paranormal Activity basically took the place of the Saw movies which were coming out every Halloween but got progressively worse ratings, now PA is doing the same thing.

[seanotron 2307]

Yup, we went from torture-porn to jump-scares. Can't say I'll miss the torture-porn, though.

[RyanSz 3140]

I was always a fan of the torture porn since even though they were about the gore, they had some semblance of story that set up the whole frame as to why these people were dying such horrible deaths. The jump-scare genre I feel is "hipster horror" or "teen horror" where douchebags in American Eagle or Ed Hardy claim that these movies are the top of the horror foodchain. The Saw series, for all of its issues of becoming solely for gorehounds, still had a decent story for the most part with concern to a man wanting revenge against those who took their lives for granted and so he built this underworld group to exact that revenge.

 

Paranormal Activity had a decent story for the first movie about a couple trying to figure out if their house was haunted, but the story fell apart in the sequels as it was revealed it was all a part of some cult targeting the two sisters. Plus with found footage movies they are at the disadvantage of having to come up with a plausible reason for their being a visual camera that the characters know about, which it has failed at for the last couple of sequels.

[seanotron 2307]

The first Saw had a good story. The sequels were money-grabbing garbage with very little story or plot, just excuses to execute people in more and more elaborate and disgusting ways. You can tell the decline in quality just from the acting talent involved. We went from Danny Glover & Cary Elwes to a bunch of C-list TV actors no one ever heard of.

 

I just don't care for torture-porn. It encourages the audience to root not for characters but for more elaborate and grisly deaths. That's why I liked Cabin in the Woods, I felt it really effectively skewered that whole genre.

 

That being said, jump-scare movies get pretty tiresome, too. As does any genre that gets overdone. I've enjoyed a lot of the superhero movies in the last 4 yeas, but I feel like we're getting to a tipping point with that, too.

[RyanSz 3140]

To me it seems PA is getting really close to its Saw tipping point as well, especially with the rumor there is going to be a Spanish spinoff. Saw was fine for me up until the 6th one which was basically a hamfisted political statement about healthcare which I found ironic in a horror movie. The others had just enough story to connect the dots but became more and more about traps, hell there were even two seasons of a reality show on VH1 where actresses tried out to become a nameless victim in the movies.

 

Superhero movies have bounced back from the tipping point with the Marvel movies and Dark Knight series, but the tipping point really should have happened after X-Men became a huge hit and then people were spitting out Ghost Rider, Elektra, Daredevil, Hulk, and the Fantastic Four sequel.

[seanotron 2307]

Oh I agree, I think those PA movies are just about to overstay their welcome (though as I said, the profit margin is so insane on those that there will probably be at least 2 or 3 more before they throw in the towel). And I think there was a superhero tipping point in the mid 00's. X-Men 2 was the high point, then we had crap like X3, Fantastic Four 2, etc. But there was a bounceback with The Dark Knight and the Marvel stuff. But now we've got Thor 2, Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, Captain America 2, etc. I think we're approaching the saturation point again, though it probably depends on how good some of these sequels turn out to be.

 

I actually liked Ang Lee's Hulk (it's probably the most beautifully shot comic movie I've ever seen) but I understand why people don't like it as a Hulk or Marvel movie.

[RyanSz 3140]

And see I liked X3 for how it handled the storylines set up in the previous movie, especially Phoenix which should have never been brought up since it's such a huge part of the X-Men universe. The sad thing about PA and Saw is like with all horror movies, they are so cheap to make for the most part that a studio is almost guaranteed to make a profit off of them. I mean the only Friday the 13th movie to not make a real profit was the shitty Jason X, which goes to show that even Jason Takes Manhattan was financially successful. The biggest budget for one of those movies was with Freddy vs. Jason which was 25 million which is a drop in the bucket these days for a blockbuster movie.

 

As far as phase two goes for superhero movies, I think the Thor, Iron Man, and Cap. America sequels will be fine because they have the same amount of oversight as their predecessors. The ones that can really cause a tip are Man of Steel and Guardians of the Galaxy. Man of Steel because it is trying to be a gritty Superman movie coming off of a very boring lackluster Superman Returns, though its possible since DC has been changing the character a bit in order to prepare its audience for the new look. Guardians of the Galaxy is the one that is going to have a lot of people looking at it under a microscope as it's rumored to be mentioned in the new Iron Man movie and it is supposed to link in with Avengers 2 and lead to Phase 3 for the Marvel film universe. It's being directed by James Gunn of Super and Sliver fame so the work is really going to have to speak for itself coming from a cult director. Also, the series isn't as well known as other Marvel properties so it is going to take some heavy publicity to sell this movie to people which makes the need for it to be successful even larger.

[seanotron 2307]

I just think the culture-at-large can only support that stuff for so long before people say, 'Oh god, another superhero movie?'. I mean, I already hear people saying that now. It all moves in cycles. It's the same thing with vampires.

 

I thought X3 was pretty awful. So many plot/script issues. And bad characterization. Prof X is suddenly a douche, Cyclops gets killed off screen, Juggernaut is just a series of one-liners. I really hated it.

[Blast Hardcheese 636]

Okay, so Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is not a "bananas" awful film, but it still manages to boggle the mind as to why it was made (beyond attempting to coast on the coattails the first film, of course).

 

I hated this film, for no other reason that it posits that this schlocky, cookie-cutter, and pedestrian movie is the actual "reality" to a much more original, horrifying and realistic film, The Blair Witch Project. That's right: The Blair Witch Project was the fictional movie in the Book of Shadows slickly-produced, horror-cliched, and marginally acted universe! Add to this, a "book of shadows" is never addressed or even alluded to once in the film (what the hell does that even mean?!?)

 

The main character lives in an old broom factory. There's a goth chick. And a Wicca chick. The Sheriff can talk on the phone and be on live feed TV at the same time. There's video cameras aplenty! And creepy children. Oh, and did I leave out that crazy twist ending?

 

Groan...

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WtrIgbvsWU

[seanotron 2307]

One of the weird things about this movie is the decision to basically name every character after the actor portraying them. So we have Kim Director as 'Kim Diamond', Jeffrey Donovan of Burn Notice as 'Jeffrey Patterson', and then the super lazy ones like Erica Leershen as 'Erica Geerson', Tristine Ryler as 'Tristine Skyler', etc. Oooh, you changed one letter, very clever.

[Blast Hardcheese 636]

I just got into an argument the other night with a Wiccan-goth who swore up and down that this film "...faithfully represents my people."

 

Kind of like how Battlefield Earth represents Scientologists, I suppose.

[PlanBFromOuterSpace 3138]

One of the weird things about this movie is the decision to basically name every character after the actor portraying them. So we have Kim Director as 'Kim Diamond', Jeffrey Donovan of Burn Notice as 'Jeffrey Patterson', and then the super lazy ones like Erica Leershen as 'Erica Geerson', Tristine Ryler as 'Tristine Skyler', etc. Oooh, you changed one letter, very clever.

Wow, how did I not see this thread before? Huh...

 

Anyway, it's kind of just aping the first film, as those characters were just whatever the actors' names were. Of course, that film was playing up the realism and wasn't as scripted and when you're getting more real reactions from folks, you don't want them fucking up by calling each other the wrong name. The sequel wasn't using the same gimmick, so it just seems sort of lazy, but I'm sure that some asshole in the creative process claimed it was an "homage". This was such a shitty film, but the director (Joe Berlinger) is an awesome documentarian, and just about anything else he's done would be worth checking out.

 

I saw this opening night, and it was the first movie that I ever saw at the theater I've been working at for forever. It was one two screens, but there were maybe a dozen people in my showing.

[Lando 2019]

One of the weird things about this movie is the decision to basically name every character after the actor portraying them. So we have Kim Director as 'Kim Diamond', Jeffrey Donovan of Burn Notice as 'Jeffrey Patterson', and then the super lazy ones like Erica Leershen as 'Erica Geerson', Tristine Ryler as 'Tristine Skyler', etc. Oooh, you changed one letter, very clever.

 

Well I am betting that Kim Diamond is a hat tip to King Diamond whose real name is Kim Petersen. Not sure about the others though.

[seanotron 2307]

 

Well I am betting that Kim Diamond is a hat tip to King Diamond whose real name is Kim Petersen. Not sure about the others though.

 

 

[Quasar Sniffer 4174]