Blair Witch (2016) Review

There's something evil hiding in the woods.

Blair Witch is like a sequel to The Blair Witch Project, where a group of people go out and basically recreate what happened to the original Blair Witch crew. It's odd because there's already a sequel called Book of Shadows, which was about a group of people who do the exact same thing. So, I suppose Blair Witch is like a reboot of Book of Shadows? Not really, because Blair Witch feels like a scene-by-scene reboot of The Blair Witch Project. It happens in modern times, but it follows the original very closely.

Like the original, there's endless running, screaming and camera shaking. There's scratchy microphones, screaming, and did I mention the endless camera shaking? A lot of screaming too. And camera shaking. It was a tough watch.

There was another aspect of Blair Witch that really took me out of the movie. They really wanted to drive home the fact that this was a modern remake. The campers had way more modern gadgets than necessary. They had drones, portable GPS devices, cell phones, jump drives, battery chargers, hard drives to dump SD cards, special op style LED's. They didn't let you forget for a second that this movie didn't take place in the 90's.

And then there were the jump scares. I'm not actually too sensitive about them in general, I understand that directors weave them in for fun, because despite all the gripes, go to a jump scare movie in a theater and you'll hear a lot of screaming and laughing. They're a cheap way to scare people, but a lot of people have fun with them, so I get it. But this movie just took the  jump scares to an obnoxious level. None of them felt natural and they were relentless.

The Blair Witch Project was a groundbreaking movie that lined up this new Blair Witch with a lot of potential. But instead, it's just a retelling of the same movie with a lot of gadgets, and did I mention the jump scares?

Worth Watching?