Blair Witch: Don’t Call It a Comeback, She Never Went Away

Even though Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez have yet to duplicate the box office magic of their breakout 1999 hit The Blair Witch Project, they still deserve stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. By launching the cheap-to-produce “found footage” sub-genre, they have enriched the industry’s coffers enormously. Unfortunately, they were not able to maintain the franchise as a going concern. As a result, the newest sequel-reboot has been transferred to the promising hands of screenwriter Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard, who duly take us back into Maryland’s Black Hills in Blair Witch (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Like everyone else, James Donahue has seen the video of his big sister Heather’s ill-fated documentary shoot, but the lack of absolute certainty regarding her fate still torments him. Finding another internet video apparently shot in that ominous abandoned house (the very same one search parties could never find), Donahue convinces his best bud Peter Jones and their girlfriends, Lisa Arlington and Ashley Bennett to accompany him on a fact-finding mission. Naturally, Arlington is also a film student, who is logically making a documentary on Donahue and his sister’s disappearance.

You can pretty much guess the rest. However, video technology has advanced quite a bit since 1999, so Arlington comes fully stocked with hand-helds, go-pros and even a drone-cam. Of course none of that matters when the witch’s curse kicks in. To Barrett’s credit, Donahue calls a retreat relatively early on, but it is already too late.

If you watched the 1999 Blair Witch and Barrett and Wingard’s revamp in isolation, you would most likely conclude the new film is far superior. However, anyone who has seen the original in its day as well as a fair smattering of horror films in the intervening years will find the spruced-up sequel to be highly derivative. (Of course, this does not take into account the disastrous sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. Even your white-haired grandma who will never watch a horror movie knows it sucks.) Still, the greater visual clarity is a blessing. Also, when all Hell breaks loose in the third act, the film is considerably more intense than the original (which sort of collapses down the stretch).

Believe it or not, James Allen McCune shows presence and personality as Donahue. It is a decent performance by general standards and pretty darn impressive when judged against the baseline of found footage horror. Callie Hernandez has a few moments as Arlington, but the other members of the horrible no-good camping trip are either blandly forgettable or slightly annoying, at best.

The mechanics of this Blair Witch are generally solid, but like Nathan Ambrosioni’s Therapy it makes no attempt to explain how the disparate footage (including digital and analog formats) was spliced together into a sequential narrative. Regular horror patrons have seen worse. In truth, it works on a basic visceral level, but anyone who knows the genre will expect more from Wingard and Barrett (the team responsible for You’re Next and segments in the first two V/H/S films). While we keep hoping they will take found footage to an insane new level, they never do. Mainly for hardcore fans of the franchise mythos, Blair Witch opens nationwide tomorrow (9/16), including the AMC Empire in New York.

The Guest: Unpacking a Little Death and Destruction

The Petersons should have remembered what Ben Franklin said about fish and houseguests. Initially, the mysterious “David” is so handy to have around the house, he earns more than three days. Unfortunately, the suspicions of their twenty year old daughter will be fully justified in Adam Wingard’s The Guest (trailer here), which opens this Wednesday in New York.

When Caleb Peterson was killed in Iraq, it devastated his family, particularly his mother Laura. However, meeting “David,” Caleb’s freshly discharged friend and fellow squad member, offers her some consolation. Despite his humble origins, David is so faultlessly polite and gracious, she immediately invites the former soldier to be their guest, for as long as takes to back on his feet. Her husband Spencer is rather put out by her impulsiveness, until he spends some quality drinking time with David. Soon only their daughter Anna remains uncomfortable with the arrangement.

Within the context of the film, it is easy to understand why the Petersons so readily embrace their guest, at the expense of common sense. After all, he seems to bring good luck. In reality, David starts clandestinely “lending a hand” to the Peterson family, doing the sort of things they always secretly wished would happen, but would never admit. Sometimes Wingard and his screen-writer collaborator Simon Barrett maintain some ambiguity, as to just what David did or did not do, but there is no question about his proactive approach to the high school bullies tormenting the youngest Peterson sibling. Even Anna warms to David, but plot contrivances will interrupt their mounting sexual tension.

The first half of The Guest is absolutely terrific, inviting viewers to vicariously enjoy David’s freelance friend-of-the-family activism. Let’s face it, there are times everyone wished they had a secret benefactor who could make troublesome people disappear, but without any knowledge or culpability troubling our consciences.

Frustratingly, much of what works in the first half is largely lost in the second. Instead of a Nietzschean super-man, we learn David is a veritable super-soldier, thanks to a clichéd top secret government program, following in the tradition of the Universal Soldier franchise and scores of similar b-movies. What was once a very sly thriller becomes a formulaic exercise in comeuppance for a Blackwater-like military contractor in a tiresome by-the-numbers endgame.

That is a real shame, because it squanders the intriguing performances and cleverly executed action scenes from the early acts. Formerly of Downton Abbey, Dan Stevens could not get any further from Cousin Matthew than the mysterious David, but he pulls it off (clearly after putting in his time at the gym). He commands the screen with his sociopathic charm. Frankly, his supposedly Kentucky accent often sounds weird, like he is speaking through a Vocoder, but it kind of works nonetheless. As Anna, Maika Monroe generates plenty of heat with Stevens, while maintaining a sense of propriety and intelligence.

The Guest has the right look and soundtrack to appeal to nostalgia for the 1980s action movies that inspired it. It is considerably more entertaining when it allows its title character to be a wildcard instead of a Terminator surrogate. Ultimately, it is a potentially great cult film that is undermined by a screenplay too intent on making statements. The first fifty or sixty percent will be recommended for genre fans when it eventually hits Netflix, but they should probably hold off when the whole uneven thing opens this Wednesday (9/17) in New York at the AMC Empire and Village 7.