It's so stupidly obvious that the tube is merely being guided past the actor's face, rather than down his nostril, that you feel cheated for paying full movie price for your ticket. The story paints itself around a series of quick-cut bloody scenes of nighttime murders that occur after a rival Blair Witch tour group have tried to move in on the main kids' prime campsite digs. It doesn't help matters that these kids drink copious amounts of alcohol and smoke tons of pot while they wait for their many well-placed video cameras to catch the evil they're too afraid to face. Book of Shadows is a movie that is all about what it resembles. It approximates a horror movie.
Every actor looks like some other actor's younger brother or sister.
And every scene looks and feels like it was copied out of some best-of student film compilation. It's a movie that attempts to apologize for the far-flung success of The Blair Witch Project by mocking its subject, structure, style and location. Your can see the actors working very hard to make something believable and good from the slop they've been awarded as a script. Although they're much more polished than the amateur cast of the original film, they don't get anywhere near the unnerved inspiration that fired The Blair Witch Project . There's simply no substitute for actual fear.