Bridget Jones's Baby your worst
nightmare? Perhaps the most hotly-anticipated horror film of the
year is more your dream, cinema scenario...
Back in 1999 The Blair Witch Project was a
truly scary horror movie that made camping in a small tent in the
middle of nowhere an even more terrifying ordeal than it normally
would be. It seems strange then to release this next episode in the
franchise at the tail end of summer - when the camping gear has
been well and truly packed away. Stranger still that possibly the
biggest horror movie of the year is coming out six weeks prior to
Halloween. But perhaps the film marketing bods realise this is a
sure-fire money spinner guaranteed to have horror fans turning up
whatever the weather.
Rex
Billed as a sequel (the second so far after hopeless Book of
Shadows: Blair Witch 2 back in 2000) this is really best
viewed as a reboot. The timeline may have jumped forward 22 years
from the original, but the plot remains almost exactly the same.
Once again the villain is the Blair Witch, or Elly Kedward, a woman
accused of witchcraft in the 18th-century village of Blair,
Maryland. Left to die of exposure in a tree, her ghost has been
haunting the woods ever since. Happily for horror fans there's
still a bunch of students prepared to go out and search for her,
lead this time by James Donahue (James Allen McCune). Well done if
you spotted the surname - yes, his sister Heather went missing in
the first movie, so he's on a mission to find out what happened to
her.
Two decades later the technology has moved on so the gang has
the latest in recording gadgets at their disposal, including tiny
ones that attach to the ear - a neat trick that allows us viewers
to be nigh-on running and screaming alongside them.
As for the acting, well these types of horror movies have never
been that fussy about that sort of thing. In 1999 the directors,
Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, hassled their unknown cast for
eight sleepless nights. The result - a genuinly frazzled exhaustion
that shows in every frame. Blair Witch however has a
script to work with and a fake documentary format that encourages
an acting style closer to Ricky Gervais's stiff, winking-to-camera
comedy. Only towards the end when Callie Hernandez, (playing the
principal documentary maker) is given some claustrophobic horrors
to deal with do we get that sense of utter despair.
To its credit the last act is a terrifying affair - a relentless
montage of thrashing through undergrowth, flashes of faces in
mirrors and more door-slamming than that of a teenager who's
exceeded their data limit. It's a nerve-jangling finale that even
the toughest horror veteran would struggle to endure.
The Blair Witch Project still holds the record for the
biggest return on its original budget - a $35,000 investment that
brought in nearly $250million at the box office. This latest update
won't come close to matching that. Still there are genuine, jarring
scares here and an unsettling late surprise that makes it well
worth popping to you nearest multiplex to have the holy crap scared
out of you.
Blair Witch is in cinemas now