“Blair Witch” (2016)
I missed this one last year so I thought I’d give it a look last night.
This remakequel does what many movies today seem to think is required and takes a lot of things that made the original work and just copies and pastes them in - because that’s what we audiences want, right? The story beats are the same and there are many shots which are identical (even the very last one before the credits) but it just comes off as lazy rather than an homage. Gone is the subtle paranoia of the unseen force stalking the woods, instead we have multiple UNEXPECTED JUMP SCARES OF SOMEBODY WALKING ON SCREEN and brief (scary?) appearances of… a thing with long arms?! The use of realistic sounds in the original (distant human voices, twigs snapping and babies crying) has been amped up for extra effect with ground shaking bass and some definitely supernatural shrieking. There’s no mystery to that.
The cast are fine though, doing their best with this dross they’ve been given, probably happy to be working. The inclusion of modern era technology works well enough but could’ve been used so much more creatively. How much better would it have been for that drone to give the characters a clear view of the layout of the woods, where the house was, where their cars were, where the other people in their group were, only for them to continually lose their way, lose each other and have things happen with seemingly nobody around to cause it?
Overall, and despite the nifty little bow the film ties itself into with its own timeline, the movie seems ultimately pointless as --SPOILER WARNING-- everybody dies and nobody learns anything and nobody will ever know what happened to anyone.
As someone who is mildly claustrophobic I do have to give the movie some credit for the scene in the tunnel, it was extremely effective and I actually had to look away. Why couldn’t there have been more scenes with that much inventiveness? I think I actually preferred Book of Shadows.
I give it 2 children’s handprints on the wall out of 5 (with a couple of fingers missing).