I still very vividly remember seeing the original with friends back in '99 as a teenager. We were at one of those outdoor shopping malls. It was summer, very hot and very bright out and we were worn out from walking around in the heat for hours. Seemed like the best thing to do was sit back and relax in a dark, air conditioned movie theater for a few hours, right? This happened to be our choice that day and I don't think any of us really expected what hit us. We all left the theater a bit rattled and I think I can say the same for everyone else watching it in the packed theater that day. I'd never exited a theater to so much universal silence before in my life.
I remember my girlfriend's sister later asking "That wasn't REAL, was it?" "Of course not!" I said back. However, it truly did feel real, or like it could be real. It was completely different than anything else we'd ever seen before. The film was novel in execution; being told entirely from the POV of its protagonists and their cameras, but it was also completely different in tone. It dared being deadly serious at a time when jokey Scream clones / parodies were ruling the box office. But this one rightfully ended up beating them all in revenue.
So after about 10,000 found footage copycats, here we are nearly twenty years later with a new one for a new generation. Even though this is technically a sequel, it doesn't so much feel like one as it does a less creative, less effective remake. It doesn't benefit from novelty value since most of us have been down this same path countless times before. It doesn't have a brilliant internet ad campaign. It doesn't have that same gritty, homemade, raw feel to it, though they do try. It doesn't seem new, fresh or different because, well, it's not new, fresh or different. And needless to say it didn't give me the same memorable experience the original did. That may be asking too much of it, but it didn't really add anything all that interesting to the Blair Witch mythology either.
There's a very minimalist set-up about James (James Allen McCune) hoping to find out what happened to his missing sister (the Heather character from the original). The fact he thinks there's a possibility she may still be hanging out in the woods two decades later is almost too ridiculous for words but I'll just leave that one alone. James talks his pseudo-girlfriend Lisa (Callie Hernandez) and their friends Ashley (Corbin Reid) and Peter (Brandon Scott) into going with him to Burkittsville, Maryland to investigate. Curious locals Lane (Wes Robinson) and Talia (Valorie Curry), who claim to know a little about the forest they'll be going to, join them. They hike for a few miles, set up their camp and then a bunch of strange / freaky things begin happening.
This is all updated to the times, with characters using GPS, tablets, cell phones and all kinds of different, fancy cameras, including an aerial one that lifts off the ground like a helicopter and can give them a view of the forest from high up. Other than that aspect and a few other minor alterations (like a nasty foot infection), this hits most of the same notes as the first. There are strange, faint noises / moans / screams and snapping branches at night, strange symbols fashioned from branches and rope hanging from trees, the witch's old creepy house, the standing in the corner, etc. Visually, there's constant disorienting, jerky camera-work and intentionally bad editing from where it's supposedly been pieced together later from footage someone had found.
Unlike with the original, we actually do get a few glimpses of the witch. She's tall, skinny, naked and has stretched out arms and legs from being strung up in a tree with rocks tied to her arms and legs long ago when townsfolk left her there to die. Even though I much preferred the approach of never seeing the witch, it's actually done fairly responsibly here. She's never seen for more than a flash and some of these moments are actually quite effective. The acting is decent enough (the lead male is strangely the worst of the bunch) and this also builds up to some wonderfully tense / scary moments in the final thirty minutes.
What takes the entire film down a few notches is the first half, which is less about making the creepy forest atmosphere feel ominous and threatening and more about setting up one false alarm "scare" after another. That quickly begins wearing thin and one gets the impression they're just killing time to get to the better material at the end. This also is heavily reliant on an often gratingly loud sound design to try to generate cheap jump scares.
I remember my girlfriend's sister later asking "That wasn't REAL, was it?" "Of course not!" I said back. However, it truly did feel real, or like it could be real. It was completely different than anything else we'd ever seen before. The film was novel in execution; being told entirely from the POV of its protagonists and their cameras, but it was also completely different in tone. It dared being deadly serious at a time when jokey Scream clones / parodies were ruling the box office. But this one rightfully ended up beating them all in revenue.
So after about 10,000 found footage copycats, here we are nearly twenty years later with a new one for a new generation. Even though this is technically a sequel, it doesn't so much feel like one as it does a less creative, less effective remake. It doesn't benefit from novelty value since most of us have been down this same path countless times before. It doesn't have a brilliant internet ad campaign. It doesn't have that same gritty, homemade, raw feel to it, though they do try. It doesn't seem new, fresh or different because, well, it's not new, fresh or different. And needless to say it didn't give me the same memorable experience the original did. That may be asking too much of it, but it didn't really add anything all that interesting to the Blair Witch mythology either.
There's a very minimalist set-up about James (James Allen McCune) hoping to find out what happened to his missing sister (the Heather character from the original). The fact he thinks there's a possibility she may still be hanging out in the woods two decades later is almost too ridiculous for words but I'll just leave that one alone. James talks his pseudo-girlfriend Lisa (Callie Hernandez) and their friends Ashley (Corbin Reid) and Peter (Brandon Scott) into going with him to Burkittsville, Maryland to investigate. Curious locals Lane (Wes Robinson) and Talia (Valorie Curry), who claim to know a little about the forest they'll be going to, join them. They hike for a few miles, set up their camp and then a bunch of strange / freaky things begin happening.
This is all updated to the times, with characters using GPS, tablets, cell phones and all kinds of different, fancy cameras, including an aerial one that lifts off the ground like a helicopter and can give them a view of the forest from high up. Other than that aspect and a few other minor alterations (like a nasty foot infection), this hits most of the same notes as the first. There are strange, faint noises / moans / screams and snapping branches at night, strange symbols fashioned from branches and rope hanging from trees, the witch's old creepy house, the standing in the corner, etc. Visually, there's constant disorienting, jerky camera-work and intentionally bad editing from where it's supposedly been pieced together later from footage someone had found.
Unlike with the original, we actually do get a few glimpses of the witch. She's tall, skinny, naked and has stretched out arms and legs from being strung up in a tree with rocks tied to her arms and legs long ago when townsfolk left her there to die. Even though I much preferred the approach of never seeing the witch, it's actually done fairly responsibly here. She's never seen for more than a flash and some of these moments are actually quite effective. The acting is decent enough (the lead male is strangely the worst of the bunch) and this also builds up to some wonderfully tense / scary moments in the final thirty minutes.
What takes the entire film down a few notches is the first half, which is less about making the creepy forest atmosphere feel ominous and threatening and more about setting up one false alarm "scare" after another. That quickly begins wearing thin and one gets the impression they're just killing time to get to the better material at the end. This also is heavily reliant on an often gratingly loud sound design to try to generate cheap jump scares.