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...

Random Streaming MOTW Review: The Amityville Legacy (2016)

"Clocking in at a whopping 66 minutes, this movie was about 80 minutes too long."

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 well 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.



You could argue that after the first one, there were no good movies in the Amityville Series. The 2nd one had its creepy moments, the third one was a bit of cheesy-bad 80's kitsch, and the remake was solid enough for a glossy Hollywood money grab, but entries like Amityville Theater, Amityville Asylum, or The Amityville Haunting were just abysmal.



We came across The Amityville Legacy while browsing Amazon Prime for something cheesy to watch, and being that one of us is an absolute Amityville fanatic (yes, she even loves the really, really bad sequels), we had no choice but to give it a go.



All I can say after watching it is that it's honestly not even right that this movie has the name Amityville in its title.

40 years after a red-tinted flashback that shows the original DeFeo murders (or at least some guy walking from room to room in a red hallway, shooting a shotgun), we see a bunch people driving to an isolated farmhouse in Nebraska (?!?) to attend a family reunion. Or maybe it's Dad's birthday. I think it might be both.



Everyone gives Dad his gifts, one of which happens to be a cymbal-banging monkey toy, which came from the Amityville Garage Sale (movie coming soon, I'm sure), and is possessed.  Or cursed. Either way, once Dad gets his presents, he starts to act irritable and is visited by the ghost of his dead father who urges him to kill everyone, because, haunted monkey.



Nothing Amityville-related at all ensues. 

WHY.

I really try not to rip on small, micro-budget movies like this that someone obviously spent their weekends off from their real jobs making, because even the worst of movies take time, effort, and passion to make, but man, this was a bad one. We spent our time watching it, so we're allowed to rant.

• First off, aside from the fact that the there was a model of the Amityville house used in the flashback at the beginning, there is nothing about this movie that has anything to do with the Amityville story. A cursed monkey toy bought at a garage sale that came from the DeFeo house? Listen, if you are going to make a cheap movie, that's fine, but if that cheap movie has Amityville in its title, at least have it be set in the house, or directly related to the original story.


• Also, if you're going to make a Horror movie where someone loses their mind and kills everyone around them, maybe show the murders. Almost none of the deaths in this movie happen on-screen, and there's barely even any on-screen blood, which would have at least made the movie somewhat redeemable. Hell, squeeze some ketchup on someone and film them laying there playing dead. At least that would have been something.


• The acting in this movie is really bad, not that anything else about it is particularly good, but given that so much of this hour-long flick is nothing but talking, the lack of quality really stands out. And hurts. I'm pretty sure that someone in the crew got their Nana to star in this one. I really mean that.


• No violence, no nudity, bad actors working off of a bad script... what exactly is supposed to be the draw here? I'm not even trying to be an asshole about it, but what was the point?


• Without the 6-minute long credit crawl at the end, and it's a sloooow crawl, this movie would have been 57-minutes long. I guess that pretty much says it all.

"KILL THEM OFF-SCREEN!"

These Amityville sequels really need to stop, or at the very least, they need to get a metric shit-ton better.

SO ZORRO REALLY IS THE GAY BLADE. HUH.

Look, making a movie is a labor of love, especially when it comes to small, micro-budget flicks like this. I'm sure everyone tried real hard to do their best here, and I give them credit for that, but The Amityville Legacy has no connection to the original, isn't very well-made or acted at all, is devoid of Horror, and it just doesn't have much of a point.



Even for fans of bad movies, this one is a tough watch.



The Amityville Legacy is available now on VOD and streaming free via Amazon Prime.

The ladies of The Amityville Legacy.

VOD Review: A Conspiracy of Faith (2016)

"The adventures of Carl Morck and Assad never disappoint."

Movies like this are why we love Scandi Thrillers so much.



The entire Department Q Trilogy has been a captivating, disturbing, and emotional journey to go on, and we're kind of sad to think that this may be the last entry for the story, and especially its characters. There are three more books in the series, but so far none of them are in development as films, and so we will hold out hope that every year or so they'll decide to give us a new adaptation to enjoy.



It's just a comfy, albeit disturbing world to explore for two hours, and we want more. 

After the events of The Absent One left him in an even more fragile mental state than usual, Carl Morck is on sick leave. The poor guy just gets closer and closer to cracking every day, and he's to the point now where he's so stressed out that he's even got the shakes. Lucky for him that his trusty partner Assad, along with their plucky assistant, Rose, are holding things down at Department Q while he's gone.

IN THIS SCENE, ASSAD SHOWS ROSE HIS FAVORITE PAGE FROM THE KAMA SUTRA. ROSE IS INTRIGUED.

When a message in a bottle washes up on the shore of a Jutland beach, Morck and Assad uncover a string of missing children that are somehow connected to a shadowy Religious Cult, which they immediately assume are Jehovah's Witnesses, because they are shadowy as fuck. We're pretty sure that it's got something to do with Pokemon Go too, but that's just a theory.

"QUICK KIDS, GET IN THE CAR... THERE'S A SQUIRTLE NEARBY!"

As always though, the truth is far more complicated than they first believe, and things get pretty dire and dark. Even Satanic. Will this be the case that finally breaks Carl Morck for good? Will Rose and Assad finally hook up? Will there ever be another movie in the Department Q series? Far be it from us to spoil anything for you here, but almost, no, and there had better be, or someone will pay!

"LOOK OUT, CARL!"

The thing about these movies is that at their core, they play pretty much like an episode of anything that bears the title of CSI or NCIS: they catch a case, there's some witty banter, things get hairy, and by the end, the killer is caught, and all is well. What keeps these movies from being as boring and routine as that type of lazy, predictable American crap though, are the lovable and complex characters, and the overall quality of storytelling that makes us genuinely care about them. Also, things get pretty disturbing and the story always seems to go to places that shake the audience up a bit, so that's a big difference too.

AND CAN WE JUST SAY THAT THE LOCATIONS ARE GORGEOUS? BECAUSE THEY ARE.

In A Conspiracy of Faith, the already hectic relationship between Assad and Morck is tested even further when Religion is brought into the picture. Where Assad is a man of faith, choosing to believe in something greater than himself, Carl doesn't believe in much of anything, and has no problem telling Assad what a fool he is because he does. The two are partners, and have become friends by this point, but that's mostly because Assad won't give up on Carl. It's ironic that the man's faith, that Carl decries at every turn, is the one thing that keeps their friendship going, and keeps the man from being totally alone and isolated. 



It's all really kind of beautiful, when you think about it.



Once again, the cast is fantastic in this one. Nikolaj Lie Kaas is more brooding and broken than ever as Carl Morck, and the man effortlessly pulled the emotion out of us with his performance. I can't believe that it took me three movies to realize that Fares Fares is also on a TV show called Tyrant that we watch every week. I'm usually quicker than that. In any case, it was great to see Assad become more of a forefront character in this one instead of just a loyal sidekick, which he kind of was in the first two movies.

ASSAD IS A RIDE OR DIE TYPE OF DUDE.

Some corpses, some stabbing, some gunshot wounds, and a particularly disturbing incident with some scissors... this one has its bloody moments.

I HOPE HE HAS SOME PEROXIDE.

There was a sex scene, but nothing salacious.

HANDS OFF THE KIDS, CREEPER!

The scene at the end in the church illustrates exactly why we've enjoyed these Department Q movies so much. We felt the emotion in a big way.

ALL THOSE FEELS.

We're so glad that we stumbled on this series of films, because they really satisfied the Scandi Noir fans inside of us. We're also really bummed because we've now watched all three of the films in the series, and have nothing new to discover in that world, at least on film. Maybe we can find some solace by reading the other three books for now...



As with its two predecessors, A Conspiracy of Faith is a solidly engaging movie that has some of the best characters that you'll likely find in films of this type, and if you haven't seen them yet, we say that you visit our VOD Release Dates Page, start at the beginning, and enjoy them all.



B+



A Conspiracy of Faith is available now on VOD.

The lovely ladies of A Conspiracy of Faith. More like A Conspiracy of Cuteness, am I right?