The Witch
Starring: Jame Allen McCune, Callie Hernandez, Corbin Reid, Brandon Scott
Directed By: Adam Wingard
Written By: Simon Barrett
Reviewed by Brendan Dousi
[rating: 2.5/5]

I have to admit, I have been a little morbidly curious about this new sequel to 1999’s viral monstrosity The Blair Witch Project. I don’t know if I really feel it’s necessary, as most sequels these days seem to not be, but certainly the first was vague and mysterious enough that there’s plenty of gaps to fill in the lore of this spooky haunted-forest romp. They had an opportunity here to draw upon the influence of the original and expand it into something bigger, maybe even something a bit different. Unfortunately, it seems they thought that an almost beat-by-beat remake of the original except without the intrigue of it potentially being a real story was the best course of action.

Following James (James Allen McCune), the paramedic younger brother of the girl from the first Blair Witch film, as he ventures into the forest and  tries to figure out what whether his Sister is still alive once a tape of her surfaces, is a fair enough premise for this sequel. He gathers some friends, including Lisa (Callie Hernandez) who is filming him for her Documentary class, and some off-beat locals and goes and gets them lost in some haunted woods. Spooky-ness ensues. Or it should, at least. Except there’s only so many scares you can get out of the sound of TREES. Yep, trees. The majority of this film is people walking through the woods and being frightened shitless by the sounds of branches being cracked. Don’t get me wrong, director Adam Wingard directs some truly intense and edge-of-your-seat, white-knuckle tension scenes, but there’s only so much you can get out of a bag of tricks that only has two tricks in it. The second trick? Jump cuts. Jumping suddenly to another scene with a loud noise is shocking at first, but then it starts to simply get annoying as you wonder if this film has anything else to actually offer.

Unlike a lot of other horror films I’ve seen in the last few years, it’s actually the ending here that has the biggest pay-off rather than the journey. The majority of this film is long and monotonous, full of under-developed characters not doing a whole lot and making questionable decisions. But, it’s the end of this film, where everything truly comes to a head where stuff starts to get interesting. There’s a truly disgusting gross-out scene that will have you gagging and the final sequence when we finally get a glimpse of the witch and are find that house in the woods is truly a border-line terrifying sequence. Unfortunately, it is too little too late as threads that were set-up earlier in the film are simply dropped or don’t pay off in any interesting ways. This big bang of an ending we do get, which by itself is impressive, is soured by the monotonous and unimaginative journey we’ve just been on.

Blair Witch does build some terrific tension, but its limited bag of tricks truly hobble it from becoming a truly terrifying experience despite its effective ending. Also hindered by not having a fantastic viral campaign behind it like its predecessor, I might just recommend this as a date movie where you can crush your lover’s fingers during the initial scary parts and just start making out when that all gets way too repetitive. You might have trouble playing tonsil hockey through that ending, though. Good luck.