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‘Blair Witch’ sequel loses way in woods
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PEOPLE will have different reactions to the new “The Blair Witch Project” sequel, but we all probably can agree on this: We need to hurry up and clear-cut that haunted forest in Maryland, once and for all.
Why either a new batch of kids or a new clutch of filmmakers have suited up to tramp around the Black Hills in search of the same angry witch is puzzling. There’s an old saying that you can never go home again. It is advice neither team took — and so they’re doomed.
“Blair Witch” borrows most of the skeleton of the original 1999 film but ups the scariness at the cost of coherency. Director Adam Wingard also strays from the found-footage conceit and sometimes doesn’t even pretend that what we’re seeing was shot by anyone in the group. That suspension of disbelief is important or why try a direct sequel at all?
First a primer, in case you just wandered out of a haunted forest: “The Blair Witch Project” was a cultural sensation. Shot for an initial budget of less than US$50,000, it grossed just shy of US$248 million, sparking trends in both found-footage horror and shaky-camera confessionals.
Its faux-documentary premise was that it was just stitched-together footage taken by three student filmmakers who went missing while witch hunting. Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez did such a good job that audiences initially really believed three souls had been lost.
The original was quaint horror by today’s standard, more psychologically traumatizing and not at all gory. The three students gradually turn on each other in the face of escalating hysteria. It ended with a snot-nosed, half-faced apology by one victim. In the sequel, her brother (James Allen McCune) is determined to find out what happened 20 years ago. So he and three friends (Callie Hernandez, Brandon Scott, Corbin Reid), incredibly, suit up to tramp in the same creepy woods. This time, our heroes are joined by some locals (Wes Robinson and Valorie Curry) who know the woods — but may have their own agenda — and writer Simon Barrett has weaved in a sly lesson about our confidence in high-tech gizmos. The group seems invincible with their GPS, digital walkie-talkies, memory cards and earpieces. (They even brought a drone.) Good luck with that, guys.
This sequel gets progressively messy while “The Blair Witch Project” grew progressively taut. In this movie, the filmmakers throw out a lot of elements that are dead ends — double-crossing, infections and time shifts. The film really only rights itself in the final, breathtaking sequences when the title character applies her special brand of pressure.
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