Critics reviews

There's a superfluity of recording devices, including mounted body and surveillance cams; old-school mini DV; and even a drone, none of which pay off in any clever or satisfying way; rather the ability to cut all of the variously captured footage together into a straight-forward, almost classical shot-reverse-shot narrative only underlines the filmmakers' lack of imagination. Blair Witchby necessity requires a series of strict limitations; otherwise it's only a movie.

The cast acquits itself naturally enough for the faux-vérité proceedings, but director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett, longtime collaborators heretofore best known for 2011 breakout You're Next, don't quite succeed in bringing any of these characters to life. Wingard seems to have expended a lot more energy in devising the film's marvelously glitchy visual scheme, the unintended result being that it's the gadgets, and not the people themselves, that often seem to be truly imperiled here.

If nothing else, "Blair Witch," a so-so new entry in the found-footage freakout subgenre, suggests that the gimmicky franchise resuscitation is not strictly the domain of the major studios. But to be fair, it's also one of the few examples of this dispiriting trend that does, from time to time, elicit your admiration for the cheeky inventiveness of the filmmaking instincts on display.

Wingard, who's proven his genre bona fides with You're Next andThe Guest, was a teenager when the first film came out, and is clearly thrilled to be expanding (and, in certain cases, retconning) the mythos. His effort is valiant but mostly serves to remind that the original was lightning in a bottle — the more resources are put into trying to replicate it, the less the results resemble it.

I kept waiting for a truly terrifying thing to happen–something beyond the sound of young people whimpering, or the look of their grimy, bloodied faces as they're ambushed by an unexpected someone or something–and just as I thought that thing must surely be right around the corner, the credits began rolling. Your enjoyment of Blair Witch depends mightily on your tolerance for watching annoying people get the pants scared off them in the woods. Me? That night, I slept like a baby.

Blair Witch makes no attempt at realism. Instead, Wingard and Barrett have constructed a blaring, jolting haunted rollercoaster of a film, one that replaces Myrick and Sánchez's homespun spookery with a veritable assault of jump scares, body horror, breathless chases, and ear-shattering screams... When it's all over and the lights come up, Blair Witch leaves one feeling swatted, thrashed, and thrown around, not to mention nearly deafened by the film's screeching sound design. But to what end?

While it's ostensibly a bold gesture to reboot the pre-viral benchmark of independent cinema, Adam Wingard's millennial sequel Blair Witch lacks what its cunning predecessor had in spades: the element of surprise, both in its premise and its grassroots promotional method... In its general lack of imagination, illogical use of found footage, and stultifying narration, Blair Witch falls well short of its predecessor—even if there are a few jump scares.

What made The Blair Witch Project special was its total commitment to its student-film premise—it was unnerving precisely because it didn't look like a real movie. Blair Witch, by contrast, simulates amateurishness in the same highly professional manner as countless Blair Witch rip-offs before it... The original film inspired the imagination. This one, like most modern horror sequels, only dulls it.

Working with so little money, The Blair Witch Project had no choice but to tease the audience into being scared of what it couldn't see; the new Blair Witch, with its Pacific Rim soundtrack, tries to yell until your eardrums bleed.

If you go down to the woods today, well, you're not in for the biggest of surprises. An effectively jumpy, artfully artless follow-up to 1999's landmark exercise in no-budget horror "The Blair Witch Project," Adam Wingard's "Blair Witch" plays enjoyably on viewers' familiarity with the franchise as a new generation of enterprising young filmmakers is sent hiking in the Black Hills — before the considerably more gifted young filmmakers behind the camera fall prey to the plainly familiar.