A Year of Garbage Movies #96, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)
Take a bunch of people with no acting ability, no script to speak of, a real location with a made-up story and present it as found-footage. You’ve got the recipe for a cultural phenomenon and a run-away hit that will spark an entire sub-genre of horror.
Interestingly enough, all you have to do is take away the found-footage part and you just list out all the things that make a movie terrible. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 does exactly that.
I actually forgot that this wasn’t the R-rated cut of James Gunn’s Scooby-Doo a few times. Our main guy is basically Shaggy: the scruffy chin-hair, his house is full of marijuana plants, and he’s literally driving a re-skinned Mystery Machine
The gang (none of whom know each other except one couple in the group) embarks on a fairly self-defeating journey to explore the ruins which form the basis of the Blair Witch legend, then immediately get piss-drunk and high (including the pregnant one) and pass out. This would be less weird if they hadn’t all been sought out for their different “skills” and had never met each other prior to this.
Speaking of skills, they seem to be the following
- Freddie — wrote a book once
- Shaggy — was in a mental hospital and owns several cameras
- Velma — is psychic, as we can tell because she’s a goth and “divines” details about people before her powers just quit working halfway through the movie
- Daphne — husband(?) wrote a book once
- Scooby — is Wiccan
The Scooby connection is a bit tenuous but for much of the movie she’s the only one naked like Scooby is so I’m going to have to run with that.
SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!
People start dying off and the big reveal is that the 3 surviving characters are having some sort of shared delusion and did it all themselves. And also they had a ritualistic orgy while they were blackout drunk and destroyed their own equipment. And then got dressed again and posed themselves to cause maximum confusion when they woke up. And also hallucinated the same dialogue somehow.
Anyway yeah, this movie deserved its spot on the list. At least no one seems to have held it against the actual sequel in 2016.
Pros:
- Despite this movie, Jeffrey Donovan got the lead role in Burn Notice so there’s that.
- There is no equivalent to Scrappy Doo here.
Cons:
- Should have been a cautionary tale for the directors of [REC] 3 but wasn’t.
- Literal skull-humping is depicted on-screen
- The sheriff looks a bit like redneck Ron Jeremy and given the nudity and orgy scene it always instills a sense of unease when he appears on screen. I guess that’s the horror element.
- I now know less about mental illness than I did before watching this movie. I unlearned things. Not like it challenged my beliefs; it just made me stupider.
