Blair Witch (1/2)

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. Though the odds are slim, it has a chance. I would wager, then, that in half the time it would take to reproduce a great play, a monkey could easily draft a screenplay with more skill and subtlety than "Blair Witch," easily one of the worst films I have seen in a while. I don't know if that's a compliment to the simple odds of chance or an insult to the skill and brainpower of the filmmakers behind this slosh.

In 1999, "The Blair Witch Project" began what has been dubbed 'the shakey-cam' style of filmmaking. It's borderline documentary, and the film did it with such skill and art that many people believed the three actors to be truly missing persons. Even today, rewatching this film is a powerful testament to structure, psychological horror, and growing suspense. I wouldn't say that I still find the film scary, but it does what great horror always has done: it burrows deep into our psyche. I'd even go so far to say that the final 5 minutes of the original film are some of the most genuinely-horrifying and eerie moments I have ever seen in a movie.

It's almost 17 years later, and we find Hollywood churning out work like this; a movie so riddled with inconsistencies and jump scares that it's a wonder it was ever at all greenlit. The plot is so thin that it's barely there: a young boy tried to find his sister (Heather, the girl from the original film) who he believes is still alive in the woods based on footage he found online. Why he would assume a girl missing for over 20 years (don't forget, the original was footage found from 1994) would still be alive is one thing, but he convinces 3 of his friends to journey with him to find out the truth. At this point in the movie, he should have become concerned at seeing his friends are all attractive teenagers who fit the standard slasher lineup: a couple who is more interested in sex than anything else, a single and beautiful brunette, and a single teenage boy. Perfect.

In the woods, they quickly begin a camp out and are joined by a local couple who originally discovered the online footage. In the night, many of the iconic 'stick-figure' voodoo dolls are mysteriously hung up. I wonder who's to blame? So forth and so on, the characters find themselves stuck in a loop as in the original: unable to find their way out of the woods. The local couple admits to stringing up the figures to conjure up fear, and yet the next night when they return, the group is again terrified of the mysteries of the woods.

Where the original found horror in the unseen (I think the most horrifying moment is hearing a baby laughing in the distance while the campers sleep in the safety of their tent), this movie throws it all at the screen, with mutilated bodies and scary naked monsters roaming free at any given moment. There is no suspense, no build up, and justly no pay off. What the original mastered, this isn't even a pale comparison. It is garbage.

I give the film 1/2 a star as opposed to zero based solely on the performance of Callie Hernandez (the single, attractive brunette) who in the final minutes of the film gives one of the most authentic performances of panic I think I have ever seen. The quiver in her voice, the inconsistency with her breathing. For only a moment, I found myself actually understanding the horror meant to be felt by the characters on screen. Too bad for me that I only began caring in the last 30 or 40 seconds of the entire film. What a mess.