This will probably come to a surprise who knows me on a personal level, but I don’t consider myself that critical of a person. I like to watch “cringe” videos on the Internet and point out the good qualities in them. Movies like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Troll 2 are legit inspirations to me. I think I’m a pretty easy lay, figuratively speaking. (But seriously, hmu if you’re dtf.) That’s why I’d like to get to the positives of the new Blair Witch Project soft reboot, simply titled Blair Witch. I went to just about the nicest movie theater I’ve ever been to. They had ice cream, a Starbucks, and slushies at the concession stand. The seats were seemingly real leather and definitely real comfortable. The screen was larger than the state of Pennsylvania. That’s where it ends. Those are the positives I came out with. I’m not joking or exaggerating. That’s all I’ve got.
As I mentioned in my article written before the movie was released, one of my favorite aspects of the original movie is its realism. It doesn’t spell everything out for the audience, the actors in the movie do not look in any way like Hollywood types, and you get the genuine sense of being lost in the woods. In the new movie, we have a cast of Abercrombie & Fitch models, the “leader” of which being the brother of Heather Donahue (the protagonist of the original), who is convinced that she is alive and well in the woods. Why, you might ask? What would she have been doing there, for so many years? Who knows? Who cares? Clearly the filmmakers don’t. A more realistic (and compelling) motivation would be to retrieve his sister’s ashes in an effort to achieve personal closure. (Even that raises the question of why some college kids could find the remains when large search parties failed to almost twenty years before.) So, in order to properly prepare themselves, they bring cameras, a ton of them. Seeing that they were well aware of the danger of going into the woods, at least that there is potential for danger (assuming they don’t believe in the witch), one would think they’d take a small armory’s worth of American defense with them. Nope. Not only is this crew lackluster in the thinking department, they’re also kind of assholes. At the offset of their journey, one of them is injured. (S)he should clearly be taken to a hospital, rather than roaming around some woods, but the others lie to her about the injury being better than it feels and carry on. Later on, after the injury gets much, much worse, the character climbs a whole tree with relative ease. Pretty impressive for someone who could hardly walk just twenty minutes earlier. Two characters ask to tag along and are later discovered to have faked supernatural events. When questioned about their motives, they reply that they got freaked out and needed to convince the others to go back with them...What? Why not just talk it out like real human beings? Why fake spooky shit just to get out of doing the thing you basically blackmailed them into letting you do? Ughhhh.
The added mythology makes just about as much sense. I appreciate that they tried adding more to the mythology, but did it have to be so stupid? One new rule is that if you see the witch, you will be dragged away pretty much immediately. It’s basically just Medusa logic. So, they look at the wall in order to avoid looking at her. Remember that shot at the end of the first movie, with the dude turned facing the wall like the children were forced to? Yeah, the context of that is now changed, and the impact lessened, not that this movie can retrogressively damage the original (at least any more than it already has been, if such factors have an affect). There’s some convoluted time travel element that is somewhat important to the plot and yet undeveloped. It does lend for a scene where a guy grows a full beard and looks like a mud-covered Torgo from Manos: Hand of Fate.
If your idea of scary is Paranormal Activity or American Horror Story, this flick has the shocks you’re craving. Replacing the children’s voices in the first or the twigs snapping outside the tent are the sounds of a bulldozer or a bomb going off. For all viewers know, Hans Zimmer could be recording his next movie score out there. Instead of hands shaking the tent, it flies up into the air. And, perhaps worst of all, we see the Blair Witch. Rather than going with the fur-covered creature implied in the first movie or even Todd McFarlane’s outlandish, but original design, we get the creature from the end of [REC], a much superior found footage movie. Speaking of the found footage aspect, there are plenty of dramatic “glitches” that only occur when million dollar editing software edits them in. Oh, boy. Every character also enters the scene by grabbing the camera, shaking it, and yelling. Or every character reacts to other characters coming about by doing this. I couldn’t figure it out, because I was too busy calculating what percentage of my life was wasted on this crap.
The filmmakers clearly love movies, and maybe even the original version. The problem is that I don’t think they know what makes movies great; they certainly didn’t understand what made the original Blair Witch Project function. A great movie reflects life. Many modern movies make the mistake of reflecting movies, and fall in love with the tropes and crutches of these movies, celebrating what their role as filmmakers is to improve. The original film tapped into a very real fear. The only fear this movie tapped into was that of wasting money on such a disaster. At the end of the movie, a man seated before my girlfriend and I stood up and said “Next time I’ll just watch the original.” Me, too, man. Me, too.
