Blair Witch **½ (2016, James Allen McCune, Callie Hernandez, Corbin Reid, Brandon Scott, Wes Robinson, Valorie Curry) – Movie Review

James Allen McCune stars as James, who discovers a video supposedly showing a witch during his sister Heather’s demonic experiences in the Blair Witch woods. Naturally, that compels him to endanger everybody’s lives by heading off there with a group of unappealing, unprepossessing 20somethings friends to find her.

And, what do you know?, he finds the dangling witchy twig thingies and the creepy house where the first film ‘climaxed’, or should I say ended rather suddenly.

Blair Witch doesn’t make any sense and cheats with the trademark shaky-cam subjective cameras when we get views that can’t possibly come from the characters’ cameras, though admittedly the current lightweight cameras make sense of how you can keep filming when you’re about to die.

Logic is left far behind from the get-go when the characters get going into the woods from which no one returns alive. Well, would you go? Me not, and certainly not if McCune was leading the trail. Anyway, if you do go down to the woods today, you’re sure there’s going to be no big surprise – a witch lives there, and she’ll kill you if you look at her, though it’s OK if you don’t, very much Medusa style.

You’ll certainly all want to stay together, if there’s six or so of you, preferably sleep in the same tent, if you’re camping out overnight, though this isn’t advisable. But, know what?, this lot split up and get picked off and, well you know the rest…

Director Adam Wingard makes a very good job of making it as fast moving and exciting as possible, with lots of crashes on the soundtrack, boos, sudden shocks and jump scares. And the relentless score works up a frenzy to try to keep us involved (though I wished it would shut up for a while).

However, as a piece of coherent, intelligent story-telling, Blair Witch is at a total loss in writer Simon Barrett’s screenplay, which, after lots of unpersuasive dialogue and unbelievable plot developments, descends into characters shouting various first names as people keep disappearing, and a chain of barely connected supposedly fear-inducing situations and events.

Rather than being a movie, it is a ghost train ride, and on that level fine. Two or three really good eerie sequences just about save it and, to be fair, those scenes are much scarier than anything in the original The Blair Witch Project.

Also in the cast are Callie Hernandez, Corbin Reid, Brandon Scott, Wes Robinson, and Valorie Curry.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Movie Review

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