Directed by Adam Wingard
Starring James Allen McCune, Callie Hernandez, Brandon Scott, Valorie Curry, Corbin Reid and Wes Robinson
I don't know exactly what Dan Myrick and Ed Sanchez had in store for the Blair Witch series when the first movie became such a mammoth phenomenon. All I know is that they wanted nothing to do with the second film. And then said film underperformed, and this series laid dormant for a decade and a half. The Haxan Films crew went their separate ways, doing some of their own movies of varying quality and genre, and the entire world seemed to forget about the little movie from 1999 that came along and wiped the floor with all of the slick, witty postmodern slasher flicks of the era. Until Adam Wingard came along...
The reports that Wingard was going to be involved with this project had me excited. He's been one of the supervising producers of the V/H/S films, and while some segments in those are definitely better than others, they're loads of fun regardless. His movie You're Next is one of my top 10 horror films of the decade so far. The Guest is also pretty damn good, with Dan "The Man" Stevens turning in a tour-de-force performance. The advance ad campaign was also pretty creative, with a poster saying merely "The Woods" and Wingard's name attached to it. And then the reveal that this was Blair Wich 2016. Hells yeah. Do people still say that? I doubt it, but count me in. In short, everything seemed to be lining up for a big triumphant return of the movie that was such a huge part of my high school days. The epic conclusion: I went on opening night. And...it sucked. Man, I've been on a real negative role lately with this here blog, eh?
Sitting in the theater a few months back, the first thing that jumped out at me was that it had a setup...that was essentially the exact same thing that I would have written. Meet James Donahue (James Allen McCune), all around nice guy who is, you guessed it, the little brother of Heather Donahue from the original film. Obviously, the disappearance still haunts him, and the discovery of a weird YouTube video that indicates that his sister may still be alive sets the plot in motion. We have a logical story device, a solid emotional hook in the sibling searching for his long-list sister, and even a decent-enough actor in McCune playing the lead. Unfortunately, we soon begin meeting the rest of the characters who head out into Burkitsville woods to solve the mystery (ruh-roh Raggy - second week in a row that I get to dust out that joke!).
The secondary characters consist mostly of his friends. There's Ashley (Corbin Reid) and the requisite film student character Lisa (Callie Hernandez), which gives us the reason for the whole being filmed. She also had the foresight to bring a drone to tail them into the woods as aid in case of being lost, a gimmick that will pay off later in one of the most unintentionally funny kill scenes in horror history. There's also a couple of locals who know the area in Talia (Valorie Curry) and Lane (Wes Robinson). All of these people? Pretty vanilla, and not terribly captivating. But the person that I want to talk about is Peter.
Played by Brandon Scott, he's James' best friend and going by what we get in the opening trimester of this flick one has to wonder why he ever agreed to come along in the first place. Affectionately referred to by someone walking out of my theater viewing as "Mr. McBitchypants," he immediately begins complaining. About everything. The walk. The legend. The Witch. Everything is dumb, an everything is a massive waste of time. In short, the dude screams "cannon fodder" from the second he appears onscreen. For everyone who complains about how unlikable Heather was in the first film, she ain't got nuthin' on this guy.
You might be wondering what we get from this point on in terms of a story. Well, this is the most disappointing aspect of the movie to this reporter. Last week, I admitted that Book of Shadows was a terrible movie in execution but that I give it massive props for at least trying something radically different from the formula. This one? If you've seen the first movie, you've seen this one. Every single beat is repeated, from the getting lost, to the wandering in circles, to the arguing, to a character or characters (spoiler alert) vanishing only to reappear later, to the big finale in the creepy house. Surely I don't even need to spell out the final scenes, amirite? Amazingly, though, it's in the particulars and the way that this film differs from the original that depresses me the most. Not in concept, but in execution, because this is a flick that shows with pitch-perfect accuracy at just how homogenized all of the found footage films that came in the wake of the 1999 film have become.
For starters, we see the witch in this flick. Fairly regularly. It looks just as stupid as you would imagine, but we see it, so everyone who hated this aspect of the original, here's your answer. I hope you're happy. Secondly, there's a body count this time around. In true modern-era found footage fashion, there's no less than five onscreen murders captured on the cameras, with the aforementioned death following the drone (which gets caught in a tree for one of the characters to fish out, only for the witch to come along and wreak havoc on said tree) being the Eddie Murphy-esque comedic highlight. Oh, and jump scares. Jump scares aplenty. The first movie was all about agonizing silence. Even if you hated it, I think you would agree that it was all about psychology over shocks. This one is all about the shocks. LOUD NOISES (insert Steve Carell gif).
Now to be a little more constructive. I can't help but wonder if this movie had come ten years earlier, before the huge wave of found footage movies overtook the marketplace and essentially established all of the techniques that would define the subgenre that this one adheres to like Bible. I actually think it's kind of a shame, because this movie DOES show glimmers of potential. Again, McCune is fairly likable as the lead guy, and Ashley is also a pretty likable character despite her decided lack of tree climbing prowess. With more stuff left offscreen, a severe cut in the amount of sound scare stingers, less blood, less screaming...there's actually the framework of a decent story here. Oh, and much less stuff at the end about being stuck in an interdimensional time warp. It happens. In that regard, Wingard (way too much use of "gard" in consecutive words there) actually did his job. He injected the modern horror stuff into what had come before. The problem is that he did this while keeping every single story element of the original, and as a result, all it does is make me want to watch the original. How many times have I used the word "original" in this review? Probably too much.
* 1/2 out of ****. There are definitely horror movies I've seen recently that I disliked more, but this was one of the biggest disappointments I've had considering the name on the poster and the director involved. Avoid this one.
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