Review of Blair Witch (2016) by Alan W — 02 Oct 2016

The recent trend to remake as a sequel to reboot a franchise has met with few successes and more likely, indifference and disappointment. The latter continues here for the Blair Witch Project and even with the promising duo of Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett behind the scene, talents who know their way around genre pictures and have worked their magic on films such as You're Next and The Guest which I had liked, the end result is less inspiration and more repetition.

Not so much scary but more unsettling and uncomfortable, the film is confined by its basic premise of found footage, but 17 years later, they are updated with modern technology like drones and smaller cameras hooked to your ears and so there is less of the nauseating shakiness but, one genuinely horrifying scene that will give any claustrophobe nightmares aside, the rest of the film is simply a retread of the first but now with less originality and a few too many jump scares.

And so, no matter how competently the film is made, and it is well put together, the latest instalment cannot escape the horrible fate of being redundant and unnecessary.