Probably the biggest surprise that came with Adam Wingard’s 2016’s stealth, Blair Witch sequel is that it existed at all. Filmed in secret under a fake title so generic, you might doze off the moment you read it (The Woods, in case you were wondering), the fact that the filmmakers were willing to participate in such duplicitous fuckery was a positive sign that they were taking this return to Burkittsville, Maryland seriously as the original movie was rendered legendary by its genuinely groundbreaking viral ad campaign.
However, lingering doubts remained. After all 2000’s insipid Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 left the franchise as lost in the woods as a franchise could get and surely repeating the same old trick as the original film but with a bigger budget would surely be an iffy thing to try as it was precisely the lack of cash that made the first film so nerve janglingly raw. Still, I guess its tough to keep a Blair Witch down and whether you like it or not, it was time for yet more idiots to pitch a tent in the middle of nowhere while they cringe at the sight of those iconic, twiggy, arts and crafts.
James Donahue was only four when his his sister, Heather, vanished in the woods of Burkittsville while filming a documentary about the Maryland legend of the Blair Witch and after years of being tormented by her disappearance, he finally receives hope in the form of a couple of locals who claim to have found some new tapes partially buried in the woods.
Hoping to get some sort of closure one way of the other, James, his friends Peter and Ashley and film student Lisa stock up on camping gear and a vast array of filming gadgets and go to meet Talia and Lane, a Blair Witch obsessed couple who do in fact seem to have unseen footage of looks like a heavily disheveled Heather catching her own reflection in a mirror as she moves through what appears to be a dilapidated old house.
That seems good enough for James who is raring to get to the bottom of things, but Peter and Ashley are not only disturbed that Lisa might take advantage of his hopefulness for her own documentary An Absence Of Closure, but they aren’t too certain about the idea of Talia and Lane tagging along.
Still, it wouldn’t be a Blair Witch movie if we didn’t have a bunch of hopeful idiots in the woods and so before you know it, the group are out in the middle of nowhere, confident that all their drones, radios and GPS signals will keep them safe from whatever may or may not be lurking within the dense foliage, waiting to strike.
However, after a red herring involving Talia and Lane admitting that, even though they believe in the Blair Witch, they still lured James here under false pretences, fate proves that all the dancyvtech in the world isn’t going to save them from the evil entity that’s targeted them as a drone doesn’t prove to be apt of help when time starts to go all wonky, the sun refuses to rise, Ashley gets some sort of parasite in her foot and the ominous crashing sounds in the forest steadily keep getting nearer. It seems that James is about to find out what happened to his sister after all – from first person perspective.
Blair Witch is something of a mystery to me because beyond the stunt of not telling anybody that they were making it, I’m not entirely sure who was actually clamouring for this to be made in the first place. Certainly I’m baffled at the presence of director Adam Wingard whose previous movies, such as the wonderfully tricksy You’re Next and darkly humorous The Guest, didn’t really suggest that a dark, wander in the woods who be a good fit for him. Where his previous movies have employed a mean-spirited wit and eccentric characters that’s proved to be a winning combination for the filmmaker as he steadily climbed the ranks, the very nature of a Blair Witch movie immediately strips the things that Wingard usual falls back on.
Additionally, when it comes to sequelizing such a notoriously stripped back movie, the filmmakers find themselves in something of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario – stick to the kids in the woods and you’re simply photocopying the orginal, stray too far and you get the woefully misguided meta-sequel, Book Of Shadows; and nobody wants that.
As a result, Wingard and this new generation of rattled ramblers stick to the original template and instead uses more sophisticated tech in order to try and give themselves more angles to play with when shuffling their worryingly forgettable cast around. Everyone now has cameras mounted on their heads in addition to the various cameras everyone seems to have grafted onto their hands at all times and while this, with the added bonus of a drone to get some aerial shots of the seemingly unending forrest, enlarges the scale of what a Blair Witch movie can be, the original film already proved that scale isn’t really something that was all that necessary.
Surely the most disappointing aspect of this three-quel is that the cast don’t seem to have a single definable character trait between them that makes them stand out and considering the Blair Witch, whatever the hell it is, now has six potential victims to launch its patented terror tactics on, more doesn’t prove to be more as they mostly all suffer incredibly boring fates from their off-screen assailant.
However, with only around thirty minutes left on the clock, Wingard manages to almost turn his fortunes around with a finale that raises some interesting concepts and really gets down to utilizing all that recording hardware in a more innovative way as it toys and riffs on Blair Witch lore as the terrified survivors run around that old fucking house like Rob Zombie is filming his version of a Scooby-Doo episode. Already toying with the idea that the evil that makes the forrest its home can not only warp time, but space, Wingard throws in blink and you’ll miss them paradoxes, a gangly-limbed wraith that could be anything from the titular witch, to a nightmarishly mutated Heather herself (despite looking like that saggy-titted thing living in the attic in [REC].) and a genuinely panic inducing moment when Lisa finds herself wedged in a tunnel under the ramshackle house that’ll no doubt be a dubious jackpot to anyone even remotely cursed with claustrophobia.
Still, despite a rambunctious final act that nicely treads the line between showing too much and not showing anything at all, the central question still hovers overhead like the myth of the witch herself – why make the film at all if you can’t do anything new with the central concept? For all his best efforts, Wingard ultimately finds himself much like his characters: lost in the woods.
🌟🌟
We Have Issues 