Marvel's Spider-Man 2 star Yuri Lowenthal, who plays Peter Parker in the acclaimed sequel, has a pitch to bring Across the Spider-Verse antagonist Spot into a hypothetical Spider-Man 3 game.
28.10.2023 - 14:37 / polygon.com
As the reviews of the 2000 sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 rolled in, director Joe Berlinger, days before his 40th birthday, curled up in a ball in his bed, wondering if his career was over.
“Everything — and I mean everything — that made The Blair Witch Project a little indie masterpiece has been falsified and trashed in this spectacularly bad sequel,” Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian. “For all its clever notions, Book of Shadows often seems more like a montage of pasted-together images than a coherent horror story,” Steven Holden said in The New York Times, while offering faint praise of the movie’s moderate scariness. Jonathan Rosenbaum noted in The Chicago Reader that “reality, characters, and fear are all well beyond the capacities of this feature.” And Roger Ebert, who lauded Berlinger’s work on films like Brother’s Keeper and Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, took a shot at the filmmaker’s very being: “He is one of the best documentarians around. But now that I’ve seen Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, I’m disturbed.”
The reviled horror sequel did not end Berlinger’s career. In fact, the director cites its colossal failure as the reason he tracked down Lars Ulrich, pitched him a film on Metallica, and made one of the all-time great music documentaries, Some Kind of Monster. To climb out of a pit of depression, he chased a dream project. But to this day, the mere mention of Blair Witch 2 stings Berlinger. He’s rarely discussed Book of Shadows over the years, and on a recent call with Polygon, said he couldn’t remember the last time he actually watched the movie.
And yet. On Oct. 30, Berlinger will hold court at the Nitehawk Cinema Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, for a group of patrons ready to give the movie a second shot. Like so many of the oddities bursting out of Hollywood’s 2000s churn, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 has been reclaimed by the horror community as “actually good” — or at least inspired. Berlinger says he agreed to the screening, in spite of the film’s potential for triggering painful memories, because he gets what the pro-Book of Shadows contingent sees in it.
“I don’t hate the movie,” he says. “I hated the experience of what happened.”
The originalBlair Witch Project cast a spell over the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. Was it fact or fiction? There was an obvious answer, but the executives at Artisan Entertainment saw potential in the confusion. The studio bought the rights to the movie out of the festival, and in preparation for a release in July, orchestrated a Web 1.0 marketing campaign that preyed on an audience that hadn’t yet developed a taste for found-footage horror. The rumors surrounding the lost videotapes of “Heather,” “Michael,”
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By visiting Aunt May’s Grave and paying your respects in, you can earn the bronze You Know What To Do trophy. Although Peter’s beloved aunt is no longer there to give him her support, players can still seek out her memorial to hear some of Peter’s thoughts and feelings on her tragic passing.