To that end, and while lulling us into a false sense of security, he employs plenty of jump scares and sudden noises.īut the shaky-cam approach is overdone, to the extent that we are often not sure what we're looking at, which may feed our fears but also becomes downright annoying, making us long for somebody to grab a tripod and hold a shot for more than five seconds.īut the film's biggest drawback is that the buildup is so much better than the payoff. There is a menacing presence that they can no longer deny.ĭirector Wingard, dedicated to maximizing the atmospheric tension throughout, includes some tension-release humor in the early going, but is intent on getting his audience as disoriented as the campers/documentarians are as he pays tribute to, while extending the mythology of, the original. What they discover before too long is that although it may seem as if they're alone in these woods, something else turns out to be the case. These characters aim to go into the woods – the Black Hills Forest in Burkittsville, Maryland - on a camping trip with an array of cameras to shoot a documentary about their friend's frightful journey. The film kicks off in the scary house we left off in way back when and introduces us to four new characters, college students, one of whom, James (James Allen McCune), is the kid brother of a woman named Heather who disappeared as a victim in the first film, when three documentary filmmakers vanished without a trace.īelieving that his sister is still alive, James brings along his girlfriend Lisa (Callie Hernandez), friends Peter (Brandon Scott), and Ashley (Corbin Reid), and two locals (Wes Robinson and Valorie Curry) accompanying them as guides. On that score, it has its moments, but they don't add up to much. That is, its aim, simply and squarely, is to terrify. But, technologically, it's an update, with a scare quotient that's pretty much the equivalent of that of the original. It was shot, structured, and executed very much like the eerie original: so it too is a slow-build shock-fest. The nightmarish Blair Witch, originally titled The Woods, is nearly as much a reboot as a sequel, directed by horror specialist Adam Wingard ( You're Next, The Guest, Autoerotic, A Horrible Way to Die) and written by Simon Barrett.
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