Blair Witch

1999's The Blair Witch Project was such a product of its time that any attempt to recreate it would prove to be a folly for any studio or filmmaker.  Unfortunately, someone forgot to pass that information along to director Adam Wingard (2013's home invasion thriller, You're Next), as he has decided to do just that.  His sequel, Blair Witch, wisely decides to pretend that 2000's embarrassing follow up to the original movie, Book of Shadows, never happened.  However, he makes his own mistake by sticking too close to the original, and basically giving us the exact same movie we saw 17 years ago.

Again a group of college students decide to venture into the Black Hills Forest to make a movie.  Again, they get lost.  Again, terrible things start happening, and they start to turn on each other a little.  Again, spooky sounds are heard during the night.  And once again, everything ends in a confusing climax in that eerie little shack in the woods.  The major difference is that while the first movie was creepy and appealing, this movie feels like an interminable slog at times, despite only running roughly 85 minutes.  We've seen it all before, and Wingard and his screenwriter Simon Barrett don't add enough to make us want to see it all over again.  They also make the unwise decision to go bigger with the scares this time around.  In the first movie, the frightening moments were subtle, with strange, inexplicable noises coming from just outside the tent flap while the filmmakers were sleeping.  This time around, there are booming noises out in the woods, which sounds like Godzilla is stomping about out there, accompanied by falling trees, tents being torn clear off the ground, and a massive light show that makes it look like the LAPD helicopters are buzzing overhead with searchlights.

In the film's set up, we learn that one of the victims in the original Blair Witch movie, Heather Donahue, has a younger brother named James (James Allen McCune) who is obsessed with finding out what happened to his sister over 20 years ago.  He comes across a Youtube video where he thinks he catches a glimpse of his sister somewhere in the woods.  This inspires him to take a trip to the infamous forest, along with his filmmaker friend Lisa (Callie Hernandez), as well as tag along couple Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid).  They track down the pair who found and uploaded the video, Lane (Wes Robinson) and Talia (Valorie Curry), who are locals obsessed with stories of the Blair Witch, and agree to take them into the woods to show them where they found it.  From there, you can probably guess what happens.  The kids get lost, there's some in-fighting and betrayal within the group, those creepy stick figures start showing up on the trees of their campsites, and the characters learn too late that it's not smart to go off on your own in the dark woods.

Blair Witch does have an interesting time-bending element to its plot, where it's constantly dark out even when it's supposed to be daylight.  There is also an effective gross out moment concerning an injured foot of one of the group.  Beyond that, however, there really is nothing to note here.  The characters are not the slightest bit interesting, and do little to grab our attention.  And when the scares do start to show up, they are of the garden variety "jump scare" sort, where an innocent person suddenly pops up, and says "Hey, sorry, didn't mean to scare you", or something along those lines.  The sad thing is the movie goes down this route a good five or six times, to the point that you not only anticipate it, but start getting sick of it.  There is just not enough here to fill even a meager running time, so the filmmakers rely on endless footage of the characters wandering lost and calling out each others names, or a dragged out climax that is not only confusing, but resolves absolutely nothing.  We know about as much when the movie ends that we do when it's just starting.

The filmmakers don't even bother to add to the mythos of the Blair Witch itself, instead recycling the same backstory that we were fed in the first movie.  They could have chosen to dig deeper, or perhaps add to the overall story, but have chosen to stick to what they know.  That really sums up what makes this such a boring experience.  We know exactly what's going to happen, and it takes way too long to get to where it's going.  The kids do enter the woods with some high-tech technology, such as a GPS device and a camera drone that can fly over the forest.  But again, absolutely nothing interesting is done with these additions.  These aren't even smart kids.  They make the same bad decisions that the characters in the first movie did, so all we're allowed to do is just sit and wait for them to die, or be carried off by some kind of supernatural force or entity. 

Blair Witch is the latest in the long line of 2016 sequels that were just completely unnecessary, and a total cash grab.  It does little to nothing to back up its reason for existing, and simply goes through the motions.  When you get right down to it, the movie probably shouldn't have been made.  But hey, it still winds up being better than The Disappointments Room.  Faint praise, but in a movie like this, you've gotta take what you can get.

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