Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's original "Blair Witch Project" became famous partly for its lack of grisly effects, but Berlinger has quite deliberately chosen a different path. Every so often he interjects unexplained snippets of gruesome violence, shot in grainy color video, and then flashes forward to scenes of police interrogation. Something has apparently happened, or will happen, that ends up with Jeff and two members of his tour group -- scholarly, skeptical Stephen (Stephen Barker Turner) and Goth party gal Kim (Kim Director) -- in custody. Wiccan priestess Erica (Erica Leerhsen) and Stephen's mousy girlfriend Tristen (Tristen Skyler) are both missing. (Yes, the principal actors all play characters with the same names, although that strikes me as a pointless echo of the first film.) And what has happened to the five members of the rival "Blair Witch Walk" tour group, who camped on Coffin Rock, site of a notorious 19th century massacre?

To learn the answers to these questions and more, you'll have to travel the path of weed, Jack Daniels and Pete's Wicked Ale with our boisterous fivesome. They sit around debating the merits and meaning of the Blair Witch phenomenon: Is it myth or metaphor, or simply a seductive fiction with no significance? Jeff, while trying to get in Erica's pants, tells her: "Video never lies. Film does." (Warning: Profound irony!) Even after the situation turns undeniably creepy, the characters continue "Scream"-esque debates about their situation. As Stephen sarcastically tells Jeff, group hysteria "is real, dude."

As the substances kick in, our gang gets a little wild around the campfire and wakes up hung over, with their campsite trashed and the video equipment missing. But Kim, who professes psychic abilities, knows where their videotapes are buried -- at the same spot where the original "Blair Witch Project" footage was supposedly found! They go get the tapes and head back to Jeff's squat, an abandoned factory full of surveillance gear, to regroup and figure out what went wrong. That's when the so-called weird stuff starts to happen: children's voices, phantom dogs, amateurish tattoos, spectral naked hotties on the buried videotape. When you play the tapes backward, they reveal a message from Judas Priest, telling impressionable young people to kill themselves! No, not really, but close. Bug-eyed, Jeff exclaims: "This makes no sense!"

Berlinger's script and direction are full of ideas (probably too many) and his sexy, lively young cast makes "Book of Shadows" move along at an agreeable clip. But his plot is ludicrous even by the standards of horror films, its revelations are clumsy and there's never much of a mystery about what's actually going on. It's no surprise, given Berlinger's background, that the evil in his movie is decidedly not supernatural in origin. He's quite right to suggest that nothing is scarier than a group of hormone-crazed, liquored-up 20-somethings with nothing to believe in. But his lengthy essay about the film, handed out with the press kit, is probably more interesting than "Book of Shadows" itself, which can't decide whether to be entertainment or, as he puts it, "a meditation on violence in the media." (Just what people at the megaplexes want to see, Joe.)

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

As the sequel to a legendary indie hit, "Book of Shadows" is a muddled if appealing failure. Its real significance may lie in its relationship to the rest of Berlinger's work. Like his best-known documentary, "Paradise Lost," this is a movie about a group of young people who may have done something unspeakable, although they deny it. In the earlier film, he and co-director Bruce Sinofsky clearly take the side of three Arkansas outcasts (their alleged ringleader, a Goth and self-professed witch) who were convicted of a heinous triple murder on sketchy evidence. "Paradise Lost" is a masterful depiction of middle American darkness, and it's a far more frightening and powerful film than "Book of Shadows" (or "The Blair Witch Project," for that matter). But Berlinger's new film strikes me as a half-conscious admission that he might be wrong about the Arkansas case, or at least that the origins of violence, and the nature of guilt, are never easy to explain.

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