What he comes up with instead is another group of kids venturing into the woods outside Burkittsville, Maryland, this time on a tour of the locations immortalized in the first film -- which, in this universe, is a fictional film (with a huge cult following) that inspired the real-life events on which Blair Witch 2 is loosely based. Got that? Where the first movie's ringleader was an enterprising student filmmaker, this one is an opportunistic eccentric who's out to make a buck off the Blair Witch legend. The suckers include an expectant mother and her unemotive hubby, a 10-years-behind-the-fashion goth chick, and a pretty redhead who claims to be Wiccan. Creepy shit (and Scream-style reflexivity) ensues, and the kids retreat to an isolated hovel where the tour guide keeps an arsenal of video equipment.

Viewers who complained about the endless strings of college-age profanity in the first film shouldn't be much happier with this one, which features head-smackingly banal lines alongside dime-store pretentiousness. Scenes are intercut with footage of ritual torture, in an apparent attempt to jazz things up in the film's opening reels, and the film does eventually convey the sense that the characters have been ferried into an alternate universe where time has little meaning and their senses deceive them -- sort of a third-rate take on The Evil Dead. Otherwise, not much really happens on-screen, although the film tries pathetically to milk the examination of some video footage that eventually reveals new information when played backward, like a Led Zeppelin album. By the time the videotaped bacchanalia rolls around, with the film's characters cavorting nude in fuzz-o-vision, their every action seems utterly ridiculous.

Berlinger may have botched this job, but Book of Shadows does remain marginally interesting. At one point, one character declares that video doesn't lie, but film does. This flies in the face of what we know about the utter malleability of a digital image, but never mind -- if we can take that declaration at face value (that is, if Berlinger isn't actually arguing the inverse), then the film's climax actually becomes fairly disturbing. Seen in the context of Paradise Lost, the Berlinger-helmed documentary that took a sympathetic look at a trio of weird kids who credibly insisted, despite strong evidence to the contrary, that they were innocent of two heinous murders, it's fascinating. Could Blair Witch 2 be Berlinger's reluctant indictment of the West Memphis Three?