![]() Although once again the cast handles the cameras themselves, their patter with each other and to-camera reactions feel so much more rehearsed, self-conscious and staged. Unfortunately, despite all the similarities to its predecessor, the most glaring missing element is that sense of spontaneity that made the first film so effective. In every sense, storywise and on a more meta-level, it all goes round and round in circles. Eventually, the surviving characters (disappointingly, the most obvious choices from the cast) find that spooky house with the handprints, and it’s time to face the wall. It’s like a whole troop of Girl Scouts had dropped acid, turned Satanist and went nuts with the crafting table. Stuff goes bump in the night (the sound design is the one outstanding element), people go missing and a battalion of willow-twig stick figures get hung from the branches. That hint of class conflict at least adds a slightly new flavor that’s welcome, since once the kids get into the woods, it’s from there on out a standard-issue rehash of the first film. This Week in Trailers: 'A United Kingdom,' 'Jack Goes Home,' 'Manchester by the Sea,' 'Blair Witch' and More It also handily drums up a little tension between the middle-class, mixed-race college kids and white trash Lane and Talia, who resent the interlopers. The encounter with them on the edge of town provides an opportunity to rehash the Blair Witch backstory (colonial-era witch hunts, possessed child abusers in the 20th century, yadda yadda). This clean-cut Scooby crew are equipped not just with conventional digital cameras and GPS-equipped phones, but also drones to give them aerial views of the woods, a gimmick that pays off in one of the film’s better set-pieces later.Įxpanding the cast even further, the quartet meet a scruffy local couple, Lane (Wes Robinson) and Talia ( Valorie Curry), who are as obsessed with the Blair Witch legend as James. Holding the camera for much of the time this go-round is James’ earnest girlfriend Lisa (Callie Hernandez), yet another film student, his childhood friend Peter (Brandon Scott) and Peter’s prissy squeeze Ashley (Corbin Reid). He’s determined to find some trace of his sister in the woods, having obsessed for years over the footage (i.e. (actually British Columbia, making a poor substitute botanically), equipped with supportive friends, assorted recording equipment and camping gear and a lot of bad luck. So just like his big sis did nearly 20 years ago, James sets off for the woods near Burkittsville, Md. ( Storywise, there seems to be very little overlap with the poorly received official sequel from 2000, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.) Indeed, making protagonist James (James Allen McCune) the much younger brother of Heather (Heather Donahue), the ill-fated “director” of the first movie, emphasizes rather literally the family resemblance. The Blair Witch Project was a groundbreaking movie that lined up this new Blair Witch with a lot of potential.Taking only two words from the original title, presumably to make it more tweet-friendly, 2016’s Blair Witch cleaves closely to the structure of the first film. None of them felt natural and they were relentless. But this movie just took the jump scares to an obnoxious level. ![]() They're a cheap way to scare people, but a lot of people have fun with them, so I get it. I'm not actually too sensitive about them in general, I understand that directors weave them in for fun, because despite all the gripes, go to a jump scare movie in a theater and you'll hear a lot of screaming and laughing. They didn't let you forget for a second that this movie didn't take place in the 90's.Īnd then there were the jump scares. They had drones, portable GPS devices, cell phones, jump drives, battery chargers, hard drives to dump SD cards, special op style LED's. The campers had way more modern gadgets than necessary. They really wanted to drive home the fact that this was a modern remake. There was another aspect of Blair Witch that really took me out of the movie. There's scratchy microphones, screaming, and did I mention the endless camera shaking? A lot of screaming too. ![]() Like the original, there's endless running, screaming and camera shaking. It happens in modern times, but it follows the original very closely. ![]() So, I suppose Blair Witch is like a reboot of Book of Shadows? Not really, because Blair Witch feels like a scene-by-scene reboot of The Blair Witch Project. It's odd because there's already a sequel called Book of Shadows, which was about a group of people who do the exact same thing. There's something evil hiding in the woods.īlair Witch is like a sequel to The Blair Witch Project, where a group of people go out and basically recreate what happened to the original Blair Witch crew.
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