Buy it... if you have an immense amount of expendable income and think that you might actually be entertained by a mindless 40 minutes of atmospheric sound effects.

Avoid it... if you prefer not to indulge in a boring, not so scary, scrambled mess of aural unpleasantness.

Burwell

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2: (Carter Burwell) Greed versus art. Few would argue that the unconventional, low budget 1999 thriller The Blair Witch Project didn't have an artistic element to its construct. Even fewer would argue that its sequel the following year, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, wasn't spawned purely from greed. There have been countless terrible sequels to horror films in the last thirty years, but Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is appropriately considered by many to be among the worst. Turning to more of a conventional, Hollywood style of filmmaking, the sequel lost all of the artistic sense of the first film, failing to draw on any of its popular creativity. In fact, none of the characters from the first film returns. Nor do the sparse technological production elements. Among the second film's failures was Artisan Entertainment's decision to go ahead and actually employ a traditional soundtrack in Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. While composer Carter Burwell did a decent job of at least attempting to acknowledge the effectiveness of the minimal approach in his score for the sequel, the insertion of heavy metal songs in the finished product didn't win any style points. Burwell's assignment to Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was intriguing (if not surprising) for two reasons. Obviously, with the first film employing no score whatsoever, the hiring of a well-known composer for the sequel was an interesting move. In retrospect, an argument could be made that Burwell was faced with a no-win situation because, simply put, the fact that any score would exist in the sequel at all was a definite advance indicator that Hollywood was in the process of screwing things up. Secondly, because Burwell had proven his ability to create strange textures with unpredictable results, his take on the cult concept was worth a listen. With the popularity of the first film still in everyone's mind, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 received no less than the "two album treatment," with a Burwell-only score release hitting store shelves a week after the obligatory song compilation that only contributed to the demise of the film.

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Burwell tried hard to be unconventional for the occasion, traveling to the woods to record the sounds of rocks banging and water flowing, among other effects. He used these samples, along with similarly vague sounds, to produce rhythms that barely register throughout much of the score. It's a uniquely low-budget solution that must have seemed like a good idea at the time. The atmospheric score was performed by Burwell and two others named "gman" and "SPLaTTeRCell." There were probably executives at Artisan who wished they had used dumb pseudonyms, too. The score starts very promisingly, with the sounds of individual drops in a puddle building in layers until they reach a frenetic clutter of sound effects. Forty minutes later, however, that clutter still hadn't formed into anything synchronous (or even remotely harmonious in a sense of chord progressions), and, in an inversion of how it began, it simply faded to an unceremonious end. More than in any other score in recent memory, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 accomplishes absolutely nothing. It's doesn't even establish a mood or produce a distinct emotional response. A bizarre experiment of standardized samples, synth loops, electric guitars, and odd synthesized noises mechanically march through their clangs, clunks, whoops, and bangs without so much as raising a single hair in fright. And that's the most disappointing part of it all; there's nothing scary about this music. Not even remotely so. Burwell himself had described the score using phrases like "the sounds of the forest, a magical, potentially evil place," "forest sounds build their emotional effect by clinging relentlessly," "unrecognizable sounds blossoming darkly..." And yet, what you hear is a collection of electronic samples that merge the totally lame tone of Evan H. Chen's Babylon 5: Crusade with the worst traits of James Horner's Vibes. Parts of it could even confuse you into thinking that the Blair Witch existed in the Congo rather than Maryland. Burwell succeeded in creating an unpleasant score, but unfortunately not in the way that he had intended. It's not unsettling. It's not frightening. It's not really interesting. And it's certainly not worth buying. *   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For Carter Burwell reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.84 (in 19 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.76 (in 9,936 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.