Alejandro Amenábar’s “The Others” is a surprise in a year filled with tepid, tripe we get over-hyped force-fed at the box-office. “The Others” is a very sophisticated anecdote of complex and well paced horror in a time where horror has plodded. The atmosphere and Gothic aesthetic feels like classic supernatural horror in the vein of Robert Wise’s “The Haunting,” with reliance on old school horror devices and unique elements of mystery and ambiguity rather than full CGI.
Now then, I’ll get straight to the main aspect of the movie that had my attention. The soundtrack. John Carpenter just has a knack for making innovative and creepy original soundtracks to these films. This soundtrack is kind of a hard rock guitar riff sound. The characters aren’t too shabby. The one that caught my attention most of the time was Natasha Henstridge who is s-o-o-o hot in this flick, especially when she’s kicking ass. Rapper Ice Cube is just great as the hardcore bull talking “Desolation” Williams, a sole prisoner who knows all about the aliens. He’s quick with the gun and manages to hold his own within this cast.
The good thing about “Blair Witch 2” is that it’s a head trip and major mind fuck that explores the ideas about fandom and how sometimes the ideas of fiction and reality can be blurred. The plus sides to this are the disturbing turns at violence that help accentuate the lengths some of the entities go through to instill a sense of reality, and while it doesn’t rear its ugly head until the shocking end, it leaves a very fine mark. True, this is not as innovative or awe inspiring as the original, but it at least aims for different and something that pays tribute to the first film more than anything.
It’s not an official sequel per se, presenting a meta-narrative where “The Blair Witch Project” was just a movie and popular. The people we see are in our reality. The whole reason why the kids go into the woods is because of the first one because they loved the movie so much. It provides a lot of memorable twists and turns at once. This movie illustrates the often blurry and always terrifying line between truth and fiction. That said, it isn’t a perfect movie folks. The acting is rocky and the characters are pretty uninteresting and one note. The dialogue is atrocious at times; there were terrible lines spouted out one after another and it was distracting.
“Blair Witch 2” is very beautifully directed, and conveys a unique Gothic tone in keeping with Eduardo Sanchez’s original horror film, and adding to the mythos of the Blair Witch. Joe Berlinger gives his film a very nightmarish feel and makes every element and plot twist feel like a fever dream where we and the characters are going mad. While the suspense is nil in the first half, the build up works very well and pay off is still quite great. I was initially left my jaw hanging down and just wanted to see much more about what unfolded, and if anything in the movie had a sense of rationality, since it blurs reality and eventually even universes as a whole.
Though I felt this would’ve benefitted with a better cast of performers, and a much better screenwriter, I got a real kick out of “Book of Shadows,” and think of it as a neat sequel that works in the way “Season of the Witch” did for “Halloween” as a tale from this mythology and not a direct follow up.
Made on a shoestring budget, “The Blair Witch Project” is truly an innovative movie in its own right, and while it didn’t invent the mock documentary format, it sure does a great job telling a spooky story with it. In Eduardo Sanchez’s hit indie horror film, we follow three film students who decide to make a documentary called “The Legend of Blair Witch,” based on a mythical witch who haunted the woods in the early 1900’s. Upon their filming and learning about the local lore, they venture into a deserted forest to seek a mythical graveyard of the Blair Witch victims, and soon find they are lost within the large area of trees and grass.