Theatrical Review: Blair Witch (2016)

"Not as good as expected, but not as bad as it could have been."

(aka All Out of Time)

Release Date: September 16th.

Country: USA.

Rating: R.

Written by: Simon Barrett.

Directed by: Adam Wingard.

Starring: Callie Hernandez, James Allen McCune, Corbin Reid, and Valorie Curry.



Love it or hate it, The Blair Witch Project (review HERE) changed the Horror landscape in 1999. It wasn't the first Found Footage movie ever, but it was certainly the first to capture the attention of audiences on a massive level. TBWP was an Indie movie that went on to gross $250 million worldwide on a budget of $60k, which made it one of the most profitable movies of all-time.





A year later they came out with Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which got way more hate than it deserved.



And now here we are with a new Blair Witch sequel in theaters,and we have to say that it's probably the 2nd best of the series. Yeah, we liked part 2. Critics be damned!

20 years ago, Heather Donahue disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while on the hunt for the Blair Witch. When her little brother James sees a video online that he thinks has a glimpse of her in it, he and his friends set off to Burkittsville find her. Why he thinks she'd be alive after all that time and still living in the woods is beyond me, but I suppose it's possible.

THEY'RE ALL GOING TO DIE.

James and his crew track down the people who uploaded said video, and they all head into the woods together. Just like in the first movie, eerie things begin to happen when they set up camp for the night: there are stick figures hanging in the trees; rock piles in front of tents; creepy cries and noises come from the darkness; and people disappear. Yes, the Blair Witch is still there, and she's still not very friendly.

OR EVER.

Unlike the first movie... well, there are some plot points that we can't spoil for you here, but suffice it to say that things get really weird and none of it is explained all that well. Or is it?!?

NO, NOT REALLY.

Blair Witch was a fun ride to take. It had its share of scares and tension throughout, and a truly harrowing scene involving a tunnel, and it left me wanting more... if only to get answers to the questions that the movie's crazy plot twist left me with.



Look, love it or hate it, The Blair Witch Project took a very simple premise and executed the hell out of it. It felt real, and if you were able to let it pull you in and accept it as such, it delivered some genuine terror. This sequel though was a mixed bag. On one hand it played almost exactly like TBWP (at least to a point), and it did recapture some of that original magic; on the other, it tried to do its own thing and add something... unexpected... to the whole mythology, and I'm honestly still not sure how I feel about it. I like what it had to offer, for the most part, but I think that it complicated things a bit much, and hence it didn't do much business at the Box Office.



It was cool to see Valorie Curry show up in this one too. She's the goods.

VALORIE CURRY IS THE CUTE ONE.

Ok, so what in the hell was with that twist?



***BEWARE SPOILERS!!!***



Time Travel? They're stuck in a time loop? Alright, that's interesting enough, but how about cluing us into why, and how it's possible, or even what the point of it is. And what was the creature? Word from the writer himself is that it WASN'T the witch, but "something" else? Elly Kedward? A goblin? A Jim Henson puppet?



Why did they have to go and make it so ambiguous? The story is pretty simple: There's a witch in the woods, and she feeds on those stupid enough to trespass on her land and disrespect it. Why fuck that beautiful premise up by adding time travel to the mix?

EVEN HE'S CONFUSED!

Why was this movie so much like the original? For a while there it felt like a remake with the way that it hit so many of the same beats and unfolded in the same way. Not sure if Wingard and Barrett were trying to recapture the magic of the original or what, but it really felt like a "re-telling" with a crazy plot twist thrown in at the end to make it its own beast.

NO ONE UNDERSTANDS WHAT'S GOING ON!!!

Barely any gore in this.

PLENTY OF MYSTERY THOUGH...

And even less nudity.

SO MANY LOVELY LADIES, SO LITTLE SKIN.

I liked this sequel, although not anywhere as much as I liked the first movie. Where TBWP shook the foundations of the genre when it was released in 1999, Blair Witch seemed to be content with aping its style, and adding in a bizarre plot twist to make it play more exciting. Or at least that was probably the intention, anyway.



I say it's worth seeing, just go into it with an open mind. 



C+



Blair Witch is in theaters now.

Oh those witchy women...

VOD Review:: Summer Camp (2016)

"Crystal Lake, this ain't."

Don't let the above blurb give you the wrong impression; Summer Camp isn't a bad movie. It's a movie with a great premise and an exciting twist that was poorly written in places, and it's a bit too jumbled and confused throughout, but it's not "bad."



It's just with a title like Summer Camp, the first thing that comes to mind are visions of Friday the 13th, The Burning, or Sleepaway Camp, and this movie is not quite on their level. 



*If you don't want the movie spoiled for you, do not read any further.

Summer Camp is the story of three young twenty-something Americans who are hired to work at a remote Summer Camp in Spain, to teach the local children English. In the opening scene we're told via news report that they went missing, and local authorities believe that they will never be seen again. The rest of the movie takes past in a flashback of the day before the camp is set to open, where we get to see just what happened to them. 

YEP, THESE ARE THE MISSING THREE.

Before the kids arrive at the camp, our unlucky trio, along with a local Spanish dude, decide to get to know one another by doing trust exercises that involve them blindfolding and chasing each other through the woods. There's plenty of other things to do around the creepy old camp (as it's pretty run down), but they never really get to that stuff, because before they can, some sort of rage-inducing virus takes a hold of them, causing them to savagely turn on each other.



A desperate and challenging attempt at survival ensues. 

THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO BE FRIENDS!

I won't spoil he twists that the plot undergoes in this section, as the movie really does do the whole Infected thing in a very different way, so why ruin it. I will ruin it all below though, so be warned.

THE SYMPATHETIC ONE.

Summer Camp was an energetic and intense movie, if a somewhat underwritten one.



The premise of the movie, which involves people becoming infected, but only for a short time, was a pretty genius stroke; sure, go ahead and kill your friend to stay alive, after all, they're infected monsters who want to tear you apart with their bare hands. Remember though, that shit will wear off in a while, and then they'll be dead for nothing, and you'll be a murderer.



If nothing else, this movie put a great spin on an old, overused trope.

THAT IS THE FACE OF REGRET.

The main problem that we had with Summer Camp is that as fresh of an idea as it is, it's too quick-cut for its own good. I'm all for quick pacing, and some intense action, but this movie could have used a bit of restraint in both of those areas. Someone get infected, goes wild with rage, chases the others around trying to cave their heads in, then they calm down, then the infection kicks in on someone else, and the whole thing repeats. That's to be expected, as Summer Camp is the baby of Alberto Marini and Jaume Balaguero, both of whom brought us the [REC] series, but this one doesn't ever reach the level of terror that those films, at least most of them, achieved.



A lot of the movie is very dark too, so it's not easy to see what's going on in some scenes.... which is made worse by the shaky cam, which is ever present in this one, and even shakier than it is in most movies.



All of that would be easy enough to put up with if we actually cared about the characters. The beginning of the movie is supposed to be an introduction to them, but served only annoy and confound. The actors did as good of a job here as they could have, given the material they had to work with, but it was rough-going early on, dialogue and acting-wise. Once things kicked into gear though, Maiara Walsh's character was basically the only one we ended up really liking. We love us some Jocelin Donahue, but man was her character ever a selfish bitch.



It was annoying at times, fun at times, and pretty intense throughout, but in a really uneven way. The scene at the end was great though, and we would have loved to see more of the movie be about that.

50 SHADES OF FOREST GREEN.

There are some gory bits throughout this one involving blood and some mysterious black goo, but the movie is so dark and shaky that we don't get to see a lot of it on-screen. 

THAT DOG SAW IT THOUGH. HE SAW EVERYTHING.

Nope.

SIGH...

Overall, Summer Camp is a clever movie that puts an interesting twist on the standard Infected storyline, but it suffers from some mediocre writing (especially early on), and visuals that are confused, really dark, and very shaky.



It's a half-and-half kind of movie for us, and one that you might want to check out if you don't need your fright flicks to be perfect. We're just picky.



C



Summer Camp is available on VOD, and in limited theaters, now.

The ever-lovely Jocelin Donahue and her pal Maiara Walsh.

Random Movie of the Week Review: House (2008)

"Not nearly as bad as we expected it to be."

Every week, we sit down, surf through the Netflix and On Demands of the world, find ourselves a random, B-Grade Horror flick that we've never seen, and watch it. Sometimes we're surprised with how they turn out, and sometimes they're just as bad as we expect them to be. 



Either way, it makes for a good time. This is one of those films.



We weren't expecting much from House, as it's a direct-to-video effort that boasts Michael Madsen as its biggest name (we love the guy, but he is in A LOT of bad movies.) Then we saw that it also had Bill Moseley, Leslie Easterbrook, and Lew Temple in it, and that it was based on a book that got some pretty good reviews, so we though "Hey, this might not be so bad after all."



And it wasn't.

After the death of their daughter, Jack and Stephanie decide to go and see a marriage counselor, because they're having a rough time. While speeding along the back roads of Alabama, Jack gets them lost. Lucky or them, local Cop Michael Madsen is nearby to give them directions back to the highway... which involves taking a "Shortcut" down a creepy dirt road. That should work out well.

SOMEHOW, THE CHICKEN IS BEHIND THIS.

Still driving like a jerk, Jack drives over some debris, leaving them stranded with two flat tires on the deserted old road. There's also another car a few feet away that suffered the same fate, which is probably a good sign. Like any rational person would do, they decide to continue down the dirt road on foot, which leads them to the Wayside Inn, which looks like a crackhouse in disrepair. They've gotta have a phone though, right? And probably ghosts.

YEP. GHOSTS.

Turns out that the Wayside Inn is some sort of spiritual way station for evil souls, and those evil souls like to eat troubled souls, or stranded motorists, or some such shit like that. All I know is that Jack and Stephanie, along with another stranded couple, have to fight for their lives against the Inn's homicidal staff, and some creepy dude named The Tin Man, who writes messages on tin cans, and wants a sacrifice before dawn, or everyone dies.



Don't ask.

YEAH, IT'S ONE OF THOSE.

House is nothing you haven't seen before. It's a very typical Backwoods Horror story, that kinda reminded us of Wrong Turn. It also felt a bit like The Hills Run Red, as The Tin Man kinda gave off a Babyface vibe with his mask and the way that he talked, which was cool. There was also a strong hint of Saw thrown in there with the way that The Tin Man wanted everyone to "play his game" and pitted them against each other.



But it's also based on a fairly successful book that has a Christian bent to it, so I suppose it is different in a way. Now, I'm not all about being preached to while I watch a movie, which is why Kirk Cameron and his shitty rapture movies can suck it, but this one was pretty subtle about it until the ending. The part with the white light was kinda neat in a way, and even though it ended on one of those "You have to appreciate the life that you've got" notes, it didn't piss us off all that much.



I know that doesn't sound like much of a ringing endorsement, but trust me; when a movie like this doesn't piss us off, that's a good thing, because so many do.



The cast did a pretty good job here too, with Bill Moseley being his usual, awesome self; and Michael Madsen, Leslie Easterbrook and Lew Temple doing their genre shtick fairly well.

HOW MUCH PIE CAN A GIRL EAT?!?

There was no shortage of violence throughout this one, although none of it was particularly over-the-top; heads are smashed, people are shot, stabbed, and cut. People also bleed black smoke and white light in this one too, so...

A MEAT LOCKER IS NEVER A GOOD SIGN IN A MOVIE LIKE THIS.

No nudity in this one, but damn does Julie Ann Emery ever know how to wear a low-cut outfit to perfection.

GOD BLESS HER.

I'm not saying that House is a great movie at all, but it is a decent movie, and one that surprised us by not making us want to throw the remote through our TV screen. Don't pay to see it, but if you ever find yourself looking through your On Demand menu for something to kill time with, you could do worse than giving this one a go.



C



We watched House on Cinemax On Demand, but it's also available on DVD and VOD.

We had no idea while watching this one that Julie Ann Emery was the chick from both Better Call Saul and Fargo.