The Found Footage Phenomenon is a fun and informative documentary about one of horror’s newest sub-genres…or is it? Flick from Sarah Appleton and Phillip Escott traces the start of the sub-genre back to moments and films from the 60s and 70s, such as the opening moments of the classic slasher Peeping Tom to Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, where the seeds of this sub-genre first were sown. We then cover films like The Last Broadcast and The Blair Witch Project where found footage really started to take form, to some of the newer entries like the Paranormal Activity series, [REC] series, Cloverfield andMegan is Missing. Along the way we get interviews from found footage filmmakers like Jaume Balagueró, Oren Peli, Eduardo Sánchez, André Øvredal, Ruggero Deodato himself and many more. We learn about how some of these films were made and of some of the titles we haven’t seen, or that missed the spotlight and credit they deserve. It’s a lot of fun! All in all, a very entertaining and interesting documentary for found footage and horror fans alike. Now available to stream on Shudder!
While I watch dozens of horror films during the month of October…these are a mix of classic favorites and recent horrors that I feel are especially perfect to watch during the Halloween season!
(Click on the titles below the movie poster gallery to get to our reviews!)
Harper (Katie Stevens) and friends visit the wrong Halloween haunt on Halloween night!
While I watch dozens of horror films during the month of October…these are a mix of classic favorites and recent horrors that I feel are especially perfect to watch during the Halloween season!
(Click on the titles below the movie poster gallery to get to our reviews!)
Click on the titles here to go to the review page for the corresponding movie!
While I watch dozens of horror films during the month of October…these are a mix of classic favorites and recent horrors that I feel are especially perfect to watch during the Halloween season!
(Click on the titles below the movie poster gallery to get to our reviews!)
Click on the titles here to go to the review page for the corresponding movie!
(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 I watch dozens of horror films during the month of October… these are 25 favorite horror flicks that I feel are absolute musts to watch during the Halloween season!
(Click on the titles below the movie poster gallery to get to our reviews!)
Click on the titles here to go to the review page for the corresponding movie!
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.
The Blair Witch Project is now regarded as a bit of a modern horror classic and while it has it detractors, I think it’s a wonderfully spooky and clever minimalist horror. The premise is simple, in 1994 three college students travel to Burkittsville, Maryland to film a documentary on a local legend, The Blair Witch. The witch is said to haunt the woods surrounding the town that was once called Blair and may be responsible for some bizarre deaths such as the murder of seven children whose killer claims she forced him to kill. The three students disappear and a year later their footage is found and the film is an assemblage of that footage. The filmmakers cleverly promoted the film as real and at the time, did have many fooled such as the teenage girls sitting by me in the theater back in 1999. The documentary style flick follows college film student Heather (Heather Donahue), cameraman Josh (Joshua Leonard) and sound tech Mike (Michael C. Williams) as they head into the small town interviewing the locals about the legend and some of the strange deaths that go along with it. They then hike into the woods to find and document some of the locations these horrid events were said to occur. But, something supernatural may indeed haunt these woods, as soon the three are plagued by strange noises in the night, disturbing constructs of stone and stick found about their camp when they awake and the sudden inability to find their way back out to their car. The incidents become increasingly intense and the longer the three stay lost, the more afraid they become that something is following them… and the more the three unravel and turn on each other. Is this some kind of malicious prank by some of the locals?… or are these three truly destined to become part of the Blair Witch legend.
From the premise of writers and directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s film, we know the three aren’t going to make it out of these woods and the suspense is more going along for the creepy ride to find out what happens to them. Will they fall to some supernatural horror or will they be the victims of some malevolent and very human element. It’s the anticipation that makes this work along with the increasingly strange activity that follows our doomed trio. Sánchez and Myrick give us simple noises and voices along with some unsettling found objects and let’s our imagination concoct the origin. And our imaginations can come up with things far more horrifying then anything the filmmakers could give us. The fear and increasing terror our three leads feel also draws us in. The actors successfully create the illusion of three real people and by letting them improvise a good deal of their dialog, they say things real people might say in a weird situation like they are in. This helps create the illusion that we are indeed watching actual footage and it lures us in and we share their fear while creating some of our own. By the time the film climaxes in an abandoned house in the middle of the woods, we are so on edge, that it’s simple conclusion becomes very unsettling and we leave the film shaken despite it’s subtlety. And that’s the whole aspect I like about Blair Witch is that it achieves a lot on some very subtle trigger events making our imaginations work against us. Having been in the woods at night and done some exploration of abandoned structures, I know how it feels to hear things whose origin cannot be determined and what your mind imagines as it’s cause. The film maintains an atmosphere of dread even before things start to get weird because, the premise let’s us know before the film even begins that our young protagonists are doomed and as the opening credits appear, our minds are already imagining their fates.
The film is not perfect. The acting is weak at times and the bickering can get a bit annoying and so can the characters. We do like them but, Donahue’s over confident wannabe director can be a bitch but, that is part of the character and Williams’ Mike can be a bit too much of a whiner. Leonard’s Josh is the more laid back, level headed one and the fact that he is the most likable of the three, makes it all the more effective when the unseen force seems to target him first.
All in all Blair Witch is a very spooky and effective film that gets under your skin with very little effort and while it’s not perfect, it is a damn creepy little movie if you go with it and let it convince you that what you are watching is real. It also had one of the greatest promotional campaigns in horror movie history which had you creeped out before you even bought your ticket. Sadly followed by an interesting but, very flawed sequel (click herefor my review) which ditched the found footage format for a straight narrative. Another favorite of mine to watch during the Halloween season!
Harper (Katie Stevens) and friends visit the wrong Halloween haunt on Halloween night!
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