Despite a couple of effective jump scares and moments of intensity, the finale fails to live up to the expectations which it promised. I thought, "finally! Maybe this is the part that's going to wreck me" but it wasn't. There's a huge sense of dread and unpredictability which had me on the edge of my seat. This is when things start to become intense and genuinely horrifying at times. After what feels like endless screaming and running in the woods, we come across the dreaded old house from the first film. Things do start to pick up in the last twenty minutes though. But whilst the atmosphere is good, the scares are too uninspired to be effective. I did like the real sense of panic and distress though as we realise that these characters are going to end up lost in these woods for what could be an eternity. I was always on edge and waiting for something scary to happen in the woods, but nothing really ever does. There has to be an extended moment of suspense and then an explosive punchline, but Blair Witch seems to always miss the punchline. There are some tense moments when characters go off on their own and hear strange noises deep in the woods, but there's never any payoff. Once we hit around the midway point, spooky stuff starts happening but it's all stuff we've seen before. It would've been an ideal opportunity for some character development, but instead we just get the usual arguing and banal banter. It's just like watching some friends go on a camping trip.
There are some nice moments of good humour, but for the most part not a great deal happens in the first half. When a character dies, we don't really care which is sort of a problem when we're made to stay with them for 90 minutes. They're just your average group of young adults being lined up for the slaughterhouse, with the technicians from The Cabin in the Woods at the control panel watching it all play out.
We're not really made to care for any of the characters and none are properly developed. Blair Witch offers no new surprises and the first half of the film is almost as tedious as the original. Even fans of this film admit that it follows almost every beat of the original: there's the getting lost, finding twig men hanging outside the tent, running away in the dark from something that can't be seen and even the iconic old house finale. If there was no mention of Heather then Blair Witch would definitely be classed as a remake, rather than a sequel. Instead of having a group of characters going into the woods to investigate about the legend, we have a group of characters going into the woods to find Heather, the main character from the original, who happens to be our protagonist's sister. One of the main problems is that it plays out almost exactly like the original Blair Witch Project, albeit a bit more souped up. It is simply an average horror film and in my opinion the worst offering from the directing/writing duo so far. In fact, it's nothing much to write home about at all. Blair Witch isn't a bad film, but it's certainly no game-changer. Unfortunately I came out extremely disappointed. I avoided all trailers and decided to pop over and see it on opening day, hoping to watch a genuinely scary found footage horror film. People were calling it a game changer for horror films and one even went so far as to say that the film will wreck you, so of course I was sold. Early Reviews came out and I suddenly became very excited. I love the Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett duo and so I was looking forward to their next project, The Woods which of course turned out to be a secret pseudonym for a sequel to The Blair Witch Project.
So when Blair Witch was revealed, I wasn't exactly excited like a lot of people were. There's no big payoff, nothing is ever shown and mostly I just find very boring and tedious. Despite a creepy final ten seconds and an intriguing set-up of the Blair witch legend, the film is basically 80 minutes of people arguing in the woods over a lost map. Personally, I'm not a fan of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's original film.
#WATCH THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT 2016 ONLINE FREE MOVIE#
Love it or hate it, The Blair Witch Project is an essential piece of filmmaking and a masterpiece of movie marketing which popularised the found footage sub-genre.
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