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The first BLAIR WITCH, despite all the hype, scared the hell out of me, as I've written elsewhere here. But I didn't have high hopes for this one. What I did expect was better than this. You have no idea how bad a sequel can be till you see this-unless you've seen HALLOWEEN 3. I have, and it was better and more relevant to the original than this. I remember an album by the Cowboy Junkies that has always been a favorite, The Trinity Session. Loved that, but was disappointed at their follow-up, The Caution Horses. I wondered why. The quality of the playing and singing was undiminished, but it didn't have the same feel as the first, which had been recorded with a single mike in a church. This sounded cold and lifeless, very "studio."

That's kind of like my first objection to this one. BW1's video identity actually formed part of what made it special-I was one of those who liked the lousy camerawork, which after a time becomes the film's natural language. To do a sequel without the flavor of the original, you'd better have a better idea, as in Bride of Frankenstein or Godfather 2.

No such luck.

At first it seems that way. Our hero is in a loony bin, then suddenly giving "Blair Witch" tours. Why was he there? We never know. But we do get a small amount of amusing parody of the hype for a little bit. Then after that it turns into...something quite different.

The film depends on video footage that reveals the characters doing things they don't recall doing. Somehow their cameras record everything differently than it happens. The Wiccan finds footage of herself dancing in the woods. She's shocked and refuses to believe it. If you know any Wiccans or are one yourself, this will be very funny to you, as it was to me, much in the same way as Nomi in Showgirls freaking out when asked to put ice on her nipples, after lap-dancing every guy in Vegas. As we all know, witches would never dance naked in the woods. And also, the townspeople begin mocking them as witches and asking them to leave-this when the tourist curiosity is being served by every store. Doesn't make sense for a second.

Sex happens; orgies happen-offscreen, so we don't even get sex for our money except in the briefest shots, dammit. But what we do get is lots of violent death, mostly hangings. What's really wrong about this is that the first film's power was in that you couldn't see what happened. The film took place mostly in the dark, mostly in your mind. And therefore whatever happened to Josh, say, was as nasty as your imagination. Far more involving, far more frightening. Here, it's just a lot of "Boo" with boobs. And then an ending that makes absolutely no sense. All characters are repugnant, and you want something bad to happen to them, but it doesn't happen soon enough. When it does, it's like a cheap echo of a late Twilight Zone episode.

And then when we remember the director of the sensitive documentary Paradise Lost(which I highly recommend) did this, and it becomes unforgivable, because the film actually has a quite similar story-except that here they're guilty. It makes one wonder if the filmmaker just looked at the victim in his previous film as material. But it's wasted here anyway, as I hope I'm among the only 5 who've seen this.

Hideously bad, but definitely worth renting and mocking viciously.

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