Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

Blair Witch

You got your remake in my sequel!

You got your sequel in my remake!

Fuck a mukluk . . . it's a remaquel!

17 years after The Blair Witch Project took multiplexes by storm and supercharged the found footage genre, we get the remaquel no one asked for, wanted or will remember in three weeks, Blair Witch.

Instead of filming a beat-for-beat remake of the original with slightly better production values and a longer kids-versus-witch climax, couldn't Director Adam "Guard Your Win!" Wingard at least have set the new version in England and called it The Tony Blair Witch Project?  Or maybe he could have gone all meta-satire with the hapless campers dying one by one in the Hollywood Hills in The Linda Blair Witch Project?

Nope.  Another haunted house story minus the haunted house, Blair Witch is a low budget jump scare-athon in which the characters keep accidentally sneaking up on each other so fucking often that one of them actually yells, "Why do we keep doing that!"

This time around James (James Allen "Wrench" McCune) drags his friends, Lisa (Callie "Coe" Hernandez), Ashley (Corbin "Bernsen" Reid) and Peter (Brandon "Not So Great" Scott), into the Maryland woods to search for his sister, Heather, who is the chick who disappeared in the original movie.  Because Rule of Sequels #1: Bigger is Better is in play, the first movie's cast of three is doubled to six by having two creepy locals, Lane (Wes "Kim Coates' Love Child" Robinson) and Talia (Valorie "Chicken" Curry), tag along with the four refugees from an L.L. Bean catalog.

Blair Witch is a hemlock brew of lazy and stupid.  What kind of asstard does James have to be to think that his sister, who disappeared 17 fucking years ago, is still out in the woods just waiting to be found?  When Ashley gets a nasty gash in her foot on the first morning of their expedition, how do James, Lisa and Peter look at it and decide NOT to take her to a hospital?  Then again, how does Wingard not come up with one (fucking one!) new image or plot point?  From the stick people totems and rock piles to the epileptic editing, there's nothing new under the moon.

These drooling dumbasses couldn't find herpes in a whorehouse let alone a long lost sister, a legendary witch or cinematic greatness.  Even if there wasn't any Blair Witch, James and the Giant Douchebags wouldn't survive a regular, non-supernatural weekend in the woods.  They may have remembered extra batteries and memory cards for their eight or so cameras, but they forgot a few little things like a map, a compass, a hatchet, a gun, rain coats, not to split up when things get dicey, not to alienate their local guides and, no fucking kidding, that the Underground Railroad did not involve actual tunnels.

Fuck this Witch right in her spell hole.

September 16, 2016