It’s time to look back at the past year and see what I DIDN’T like. These are pretty much the worst flicks I saw this year in the horror genre with little to enjoy or recommend!
NOTE: There are a few titles here initially released in 2015, but I did not catch up to them till their release on VOD or home media in 2016 and felt it unfair not to include them!
(Click on the titles below the movie poster gallery to get to our reviews!)
(Remember, clicking the highlighted links brings you to other reviews and articles here at The Movie Madhouse!)
Flick is a disappointing and scare-less sequel to the classic found footage horror The Blair Witch Project. It’s a true sequel this time, unlike the wonky Book Of Shadows which focused on the mania caused by the movie and was not a continuation of the film’s story. Found footage follow-up takes place twenty years later with Heather’s brother James (James Allen McCune) deciding to re-enter the Burkittsville woods after seeing footage posted on Youtube that he believes reveals his long lost sister. His trek to find his sibling is being documented by love interest Lisa (Callie Hernandez) along with two friends (Corbin Reid and Brandon Scott) and the two locals (Valorie Curry and Wes Robinson) who posted the footage that sparked this new expedition. Of course things start to go bump in the night in the Black Hill Woods.
First problem with Adam (The Guest, You’re Next) Wingard’s surprise sequel…it was secretly filmed under the pseudonym The Woods…is that never once did it feel like found footage. The cast all appear to be actors and not real people and the dialog, unlike the first flick, never seems anything but scripted…as by Simon Barrett. The first movie presented unknowns who improvised much of their dialog and it fooled a lot of people. Here these youths, with model good looks, never fool us for a minute that their trailer is just a few feet away and lost they are not. Second big problem is that not only is the film never tense or scary, but it actually was kinda dull for it’s brief 89 minutes. It may be a sequel, but it’s more like a tepid remake that rolls out the Blair Witch tropes mechanically from noises in the woods, to characters running through the trees screaming, to twig stick figures popping up regularly. Things pick up somewhat in the last few minutes, set in a familiar old house, but even that goes on for too long and doesn’t really go anywhere the first film hadn’t already gone. There is a little bit more blood and violence in this one and there is some newer technology, like ear cameras and drones, but Wingard and Barrett never do anything interesting with it. The drone is taken out of the picture soon after it launches. Done. There were a few claustrophobic moments in some tunnels towards the climax, but, honestly, the film evoked last year’s Nightlight far more than recaptured any of the tension and fear of the classic film that it’s a continuation of…especially in the house set last act.
This is a sadly dull and repetitive sequel that only has a few original moments and relied far more on way too many jump scares than actual fear. Wingard builds no tension or suspense and the flick is too polished and over-produced to ever feel like it’s actual footage. Whether James finds Heather, or we actually see the Blair Witch this time, is up to you to decide if it’s worth finding out. Some will say this is at least an improvement over 2000’s Blair Witch 2, but at least that film failed while trying to be original and interesting. This one is just a retread and a very generic and assembly-line one at that.
While this Blair Witch sequel is not that good, it’s not quite as bad as its reputation suggests. Sequel has some good ideas, such as being about the mania caused by the movie The Blair Witch Project and not a direct sequel to the film itself. Instead, it tells the story of a group of oddball characters that seek to find out if there is some truth behind the movie and if there really is a witch that inspired the film. Obviously, some weird stuff starts to happen to them as they investigate, and death and madness soon follow.
The biggest problem with Blair Witch 2 is simply not doing anything interesting with the ideas director Joe Berlinger and his 3 co-writers, Dick Beebe, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, have come up with. The film is a lot of talk and finger pointing as strange occurrences start to make the characters unravel and turn on each other. Video evidence changes and disappears, characters vanish and then turn up dead, but this spooky activity never comes together to form a solid story. It’s almost like a bunch or random acts that are only thinly related. By the time we find out what happened, we really aren’t that interested anymore, despite the fact that better handled, it could have been very unsettling. It also doesn’t help that the film is peppered with police interviews and scenes that occur after-the-fact and thus we know what’s coming. It neuters any suspense the film might be building. There are some mildly spooky images and sequences throughout and a few bloody moments, but not enough to make this film work completely or consistently. I appreciate the effort to do something different then a generic sequel, but the filmmakers just didn’t take their concept far enough. At least there is a spooky score by Carter Burwell and some cool songs on the soundtrack CD. (See track listing below)
The cast is fine, though the characters are stereotypical Hollywood cliche’s such as the handsome con-artist with a past (Jeffrey Donovan), the hot Wiccan (Erica Leerhsen), the attractive yuppie couple (Tristen Skyler and Stephen Barker Turner) and the hot Emo Goth chick (Kim Director). My biggest peeve cast-wise, though, is that the actor, Lanny Flaherty, playing the local sheriff, is so awful that even had the film been better he would have ruined it. Yes, he’s that bad.
Director Joe Berlinger gives the film some decent atmosphere and some creepy moments but doesn’t seem to be able to assemble all his parts into an effective whole. Apparently, the film was taken away from him and re-edited with new footage shot to make it more of a horror film, but if this is better than what he delivered, then I doubt I want to ever see a director’s cut…though, as a film geek, I’d probably watch it if it ever surfaced. Again, some cool ideas wasted without anywhere to go with them.
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