Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows
Some fucker complained that I gave away the "surprise" ending to Pay It Forward, which was that the kid dies. It is my policy to give away the endings to shitty movies, and I'm going to do it here, too. To be fair to the dimwits and retards who are really excited about seeing Blair Witch 2, I will warn you with a BOLD NOTICE.
Blair Witch 2 is a bad fucking movie, monumentally stupid and unentertaining. It's damn near unwatchable, a buttload of shit fired at the cineplex screens. It's gruesome without being scary. It's stupid without being funny. It was written on toilet paper by chimpanzees with diarrhea. Well, I wish it had been, at least that wouldn't be so clichéd.
Four 20-somethings leave their Volkswagen Jettas behind and head into the Burkittsville Woods in search of the Blair Witch. They're led by a local kid who's profiting off his Blair Witch Hunt tour program. The groups includes stereotypes of a Wiccan (it's a type of earth-child fucking hippie chick who thinks she's a witch), a goth chick, and a couple (the girl's pregnant) who are writing a book about whether the Blair Witch is a true legend or just mass hysteria (yeah, great idea, bet they were the first to think of that). For some unexplained reason, this young capitalist also brings a shitload video equipment. The five go to the haunted ruins from the first flick to camp for the night. Once they're camping and smoking pot and getting really drunk, another tour group shows up. Our group convinces them to go to Coffin Rock pretending they saw some scary shit there.
The group drinks unlimited beer and smokes unlimited pot and yammers long into the night. When they wake in the morning, the couple's research papers are shredded, the video equipment is destroyed, and the tourists at Coffin Rock are dead. Panicked, the group doesn't leave, they go to the guide's house, an abandoned factory in the woods, where suspicion runs high, characters are guided by a stupid plot with no motivation, and predictably weird shit happens.
Blair Witch 2 is nothing like the original. It looks like a regular old USA Channel Friday Night bad movie, only not that good. It is shot with steady, color movie cameras, using traditional stages and sets. The original was, well, original. This one wants to be too, but the makers aren't clever enough to think outside the usual crappy horror movie clichés, and the movie steps in old horseshit at most every turn.
Joe Berlinger, the director of this catastrophe, has gone out and beat his drum for this movie. He keeps telling journalists that his intention with Blair Witch 2 was to make a meditation on violence and the media. That's just fucking great, but the only intention that really mattered to me was my own. My intention was to be entertained, and this spooge-wad failed. What the fuck is Berlinger thinking? Is he so pretentious that he thinks entertainment comes second and his well-worn idea of how media plays a role in violence and hype are more important? And, if they're so fucking important, why did he wrap them inside lousy clichés, horrible dialog and a plot that makes no fucking sense?
It's like the director of Bride of Chuckie saying his intention was to stop world hunger, and fuck the audience if they didn't get that from the all the carnage onscreen. Well, shove a twig up my ass, Joe, as director isn't your job to make your point clear? I'm no genius, but if I was trying to say something important, even if it was as lame and tired an idea as yours, I wouldn't have buried it under a hard rock soundtrack, "hip" young cast, gory blood, heavy drug and alcohol use and all those unoriginal bumps in the night. I would have just sat down and typed another one of my single-spaced five page letters to the local paper (which, by the way, the bastards never print). It would have saved me five bucks if you'd done that.
It's the type of bad horror movie where people get real suspicious and start fighting with each other for no apparent reason. For most of it, random shit happens without any plot progression. There are "spooky sounds" and "spooky disappearances" and "spooky settings," all of them feel forced and like stuff we've seen before. Only the people onscreen get scared. It's like Berlinger's saying "Hey, audience, look how scared they are. You should be scared too."
The actors are all new, and terrible. They mostly overact and pretend to be hysterical as they say "What was that? I heard a noise," and "Something's not right." The pregnant girl's expression never changes from someone about to either shit or fart and not knowing which. Her boyfriend just quivers with faked rage, and the goth chick keeps her smudge free mascara on for days.
There's more blood here than what came out of my ass the time I accidentally ate a pinecone. Lots of carving up bodies and death, but that's not creepy, it's unpleasant and annoying.
The end of this movie is pure garbage, drained, strained and shoveled up our asses. It plays like a bad snuff film with naked people killing each other. Why? I have no fucking clue. You see, the group we follow killed the tourists at Coffin Rock. After they got drunk and high as fucking kites they get all wrapped up in the witch's curse (or is hysteria because of the media?) and go off and kill the helpless tourists. And then they start killing each other. WARNING: I JUST GAVE AWAY THE ENDING.What pissed me off about this is that it managed to be both completely predictable and bullshit. It's very exploitative without making sense or being scary. This ending says "Oh, by the way, all this shit happened for this reason, but you wouldn't know that because we didn't develop the story in a way that would make that climactic or frightening." Why naked, why in the house, why bother?
One finger for the tragedy of Blair Witch 2. I expected it to be bad, but there is nothing that could have prepared me for something this awful.
P.S. Has anyone else tried "True American" beer? I bought a twelve pack because it was the cheapest shit Arvada Liquor had ($3.49 a twelve-pack) and I have been pissing blood ever since I started drinking it. I just want to know if that's normal.