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Blair Witch is a sequel that plays out more like an amped up remake of 1999’s now-classic The Blair Witch Project. More kids are going into the Burkittsville woods where the legend of the Blair Witch is still very much alive. This time, it’s so that a young man can find out what happened to his sister (one of the characters from the original film). Apart from the fact that it feels an awful lot like the 1999 film, I enjoyed the first hour or so of the new film. I suppose it helps that I’m naturally afraid of the woods. But apart from my own idiosyncrasies, suspense is built, dread sets in, and the actors all do a pretty good job. The photography is hand-held, but not so shaky that I wanted to barf (like usual). The final twenty or thirty minutes is where the film started to lose me. That’s when the movie ‘opens up’ and relies on more conventional Hollywood tropes and scares. Younger people seem to think the first hour of this movie is too slow and only the last half hour is any good — I completely disagree.

But either way, the film lands in wholly unremarkable territory. The Blair Witch Project is a tough act to follow. It was a novel, groundbreaking entry in the history of horror movies, and very much a product of its time and technology. Remaking it or serializing it now seems like a doomed prospect, but if you’re going to make a go at it, let’s try not to tread so closely to the source material — let’s do something different. Something way different.