Blair Witch

I remember when the original Blair Witch Project first came out and how excited my roommates and I were to see this supposedly true story of witchcraft and the boning of young underachievers in the woods. I’ve always been really creeped out by witches mainly due to the fact that every rich girl I ever hooked up with in college could have easily qualified to be burned at the stake during the Winston Salem witch hunts. So naturally when I saw that this movie had been made, I couldn’t wait to do as much research as humanly possible on it to see if Blair Witch was in fact the matriarch to every girl who stepped foot on SMU’s campus back in the late 90’s. Ok ok, so the girls weren’t all that bad but you should just know going in that driving a Chevy S-10 pickup on that campus will definitely lead to some pretty lonely Saturday nights for a young skinny scrub like me! Dammit, I knew I should’ve jacked someone’s convertible Mustang when I had the chance; that would’ve bumped by street cred up big time and would have at least given me some sort of edge!

Well once everyone learned that the three hacks who came up with the idea for the Blair Witch Project made up the entire story, the movie quickly lost its appeal. We all came to the sad realization that we had not only been duped but had also unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that would eventually lead to the death of good film making as we knew it in the horror genre. And ever since this steaming pile of dog poop made those guys multi-millionaires, we’ve been inundated by a constant stream of shaky cam found footage "thrillers". I’m sorry but shaking a camera as hard as you can and having people scream into a mic is not scary.

And for a while it looked as though Hollywood had caught on to this little fact by releasing fewer and fewer of these films, but for whatever reason, they chose to come out with a sequel that no one was asking for in Blair Witch and they also decided to try and kill the career or a promising director in Adam WIngard. Wingard is known for You’re Next and The Guest, two of the better horror films to come out this decade. It took a while for me to fully appreciate You’re Next but I eventually understood what he was trying to do with his off kilter style. WIngard isn’t exactly a trend setter in the game but he certainly is good at what he does as you can see him paying homage to the 80’s horror flicks he grew up loving when you watch his films.

Well in spite of the fact that I knew the studio was trying to pull yet another fast one on us when they announced that Wingard had another movie coming out called The Woods but then later admitted that they lied about that and the movie was just another Blair Witch; I still held out hope that he would at least be able to bring his own style to it. I was wrong. Witch wound up being the perfect collection of every shitty found footage film that has ever been made. It follows the formula to a tee.

There’s 30 minutes of a plodding set up where you’re introduced to all of these boring and unlikeable characters who think they’re funnier and cooler than they actually are. There’s boring camp fire stories that wouldn’t even be considered scary if you were actually out in the woods by a real camp fire. And then there’s the inclusion of cheesy prerecorded howls and scratches that you can hear in the distance which remind you of the lame junior high school Halloween parties you used to attend when you were a kid. When you never actually get to see the awful being that’s wreaking havoc or any of the actual havoc they’re wreaking, the storyteller should at least master the psychological component of the story in order to make the movie goer feel as though they’re in it with the characters and that they could at some level be in danger themselves. I mean, I don’t remember Jack Nicholson ever killing anyone in The Shining but every time I see a closed bathroom door, a Big Wheel, or twin girls, I immediately curl up in the fetal position.

Well Blair With also made me curl up in the fetal position but that was only after I realized that I had wasted $11 dollars and 90 minutes on my life on this useless waste of perfectly good film stock. Just when I thought 2016 couldn’t produce a film worse than Ghostbusters, they come in and save Melissa McCarthy by releasing Blair Witch. I rate this movie as unbelievably WACK!