Blair Witch (2016), R, ★★

Well...a modern Blair Witch movie.

When The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999, in a year of glorious cinematic and unique work such as Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, The Insider and American Beauty, even though the five I mentioned were talked about, this movie was one of the main highlights of that year due to being one of the first found footage movies ever made. It was the talk of the town at one point of the year because many people were thinking that the movie could have been a real "snuff" film in which maybe the cast did not survive the experience because it felt real. I remember the marketing campaign was substantially big regarding news of teenager missing on the Internet and newspapers and just clips from the film on television. Well, there have been so many tired found-footage movies since then and now we revisit with a surprising sequel 20 years after the events of the first one. Except for the last 20 minutes, the movie is modernized but it does not modernize its material to create a different angle or story. This latest horror film of the year bored me.

We see that in a text, the following footage took place in the Black Hills Forest in Maryland on May 25th, 2014. James Donahue (James Allen McCune) believes he sees a figure that resembles his sister, Heather. To recap, she and her friends - Josh and Mike - went into the forest to investigate the legend of the Blair Witch. James and his friend, Lisa (Callie Hernandez), are filming a documentary surrounding the legend accompanied by Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid). Peter and Ashley tells Lisa not to use so much footage out of respect for James, who is searching for the truth about his sister.

As the four friends stay in a hotel for the night before heading out into the woods, they meet Lane (Wes Robinson) and Talia (Valorie Curry), a couple that claims that they found the recorded footage. After they ask if they can tag along in exchange to help them to guide them to the place where they need to go, James pulls off his friends to discuss the request and Peter is against Lane and Talia, in which he mentions Lane is giving a bad vibe. But, the group agrees for them to take along.

Congregate and plan. 

The movie goes back to basics but not in a good way. The filmmakers and screenwriters rely heavily on jump-scares and horror gimmicks in the boring first half because the movie is similar to the original. The movie does not provide any backstory or development in its characters and it was hard for me to care about them because they are so thinly written. Plus, when they exchange dialogue with each other, they do not discuss much material or heft to push the Blair Witch legend. Most of the movie is basically just one big build-up with predictable jump scares that are used with fancier cameras and improved technology.

Director Adam Wingard, who has made The Guest and You're Next, gave us a disappointing effort because he has experience with well-made horror films. The movie is so superiorly technical in its filmmaking that the overall result is a half-finished screenplay with boring characters not providing much dialogue and a lack of patience because we do not get into the story until the 20-30 minutes.

The last 20 minutes were the best and most suspenseful scenes in the movie because the movie laid a foundation, a somewhat lazy foundation as to giving us a build-up full of fluff but an exciting conclusion. The result would have been better if it were a short film spanning 30 minutes as they get to the same house where the people in the first movie were and then get going. The bottom line is that it was 60 minutes too late to create another solid horror film but what I got was an exciting short film with not much character development, exposition or original horror for the most part.

**