It Came From The Cineplex: Phoenix Forgotten

I've gotten a bit behind on movie reviews here at Bob Canada's BlogWorld, so I'm gonna try and get caught up in the next few days. This movie's probably no longer in theaters, but I sat through the goddamned thing so you're all gonna share my pain!

Phoenix Forgotten was "written" by T.S. Nowlin and Justin Barber, and "directed" by Justin Barber.

Nowlin previously wrote the utterly forgettable The Maze Runner and Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. Barber has worked primarily as a graphic artist for various films. Phoenix Forgotten is his first major directing job.

Take The Blair Witch Project, substitute UFOs for the supernatural elements, cram in a pointless documentary framing device and you'll have a pretty good idea what this movie's like. There's even a character named Josh!

The film's based on the famous "Phoenix Lights" incident, which occurred on March 13, 1997 in Phoenix, Arizona. Thousands of witnesses observed a formation of strange lights in the sky, which were also seen in other parts of Arizona, as well as Nevada and even northern Mexico. It was one of the most-observed UFO incidents in recent history.

Despite what the poster says about "Shocking Untold True Events," the film's "missing teen" angle is complete and utter bullsh*t pulled straight out of the screenwriters' asses. It's yet another lame attempt to ape the success of The Blair Witch Project, which also tried to convince the audience they were watching actual video footage.

The film does try to distance itself a small bit from Blair Witch by bookending the found footage with a faux documentary about the incident and subsequent disappearances. It's a nice try, but in the end it doesn't offer us anything we haven't seen numerous times before in the past two decades. In the end the documentary angle does nothing but pad the run time, making the long, slow slog to the UFO abduction even more interminable.

I just realized something. This movie is a faux documentary about a fake disappearance that resulted from a UFO incident that never happened. Trifecta!

So far Phoenix Forgotten's grossed just $3.5 million against its $2.8 million budget. That's pretty dismal! Horror movies, even terrible found footage ones like this, generally always do well at the box office. Heck, even the dreadful The Bye Bye Man was a modest hit, grossing $26 million against its $7 million budget! Maybe this is a sign that the detestable found footage genre has finally run its course. We can only hope.

Lastly, I'm having trouble coming to grips with the fact that a movie set in 1997 is now considered a period piece. Excuse me while I go take my rheumatiz medicine, yell at some clouds and pull my pants up to my chest.

SPOILERS, I GUESS.

The Plot:
We open on video footage of Sophie Bishop's sixth birthday party on March 13, 1997, filmed by her older brother Josh. Suddenly everyone sees a series of mysterious lights in the sky, and Josh shakily (of course) films them. They wonder if the lights were military planes or a UFO. Suddenly two jets blast over the house, apparently chasing after the lights.

Cut to the present day (I guess), as the now adult Sophie is filming a documentary about her brother Josh's disappearance. Josh and his friend Ashley and Mark all disappeared a week after so-called "Phoenix Lights Incident." No trace of the them was ever found.

Sophie's dad picks her up at the airport and drops her off at their old home. Her parents divorced after Josh disappeared, and her mother is selling the house. Sophie's mother gives her a box of Josh's old videotapes, and she begins watching them.

When then get sort of a flashback, as the tape features newscasts of the Lights, along with Josh and his dad being interviewed. There's also a press conference with the then-Governor of Arizona, who mocks the incident and dismisses it.

Another tape shows that Josh attempted to film his own documentary about the Lights, interviewing various people around town. This is how he meets Ashley, a fellow student who he has a crush on. Josh and Ashley show the footage of the Lights to two local astronomers, who say they were most likely military flares. They also interview a Native American who says the Lights are a legend within his tribe, and he's seen things like them before.

Josh wants to visit the reservation where the Lights have been seen, but neither he or Ashley have a car. Josh talks his friend Mark into driving them. He and Mark drive into the desert to search for the Lights. They spot a bright light in the distance and hike up a steep hillside. There they see a group of police standing around a spotlight, looking into the sky with telescopes and binoculars, obviously searching for the UFO. The police spot the kids, and Josh and Mark hightail it back to the car.

The next day Josh and Mark pick up Ashley, and the three drive south of Phoenix, to the Indian Reservation where the lights have also been spotted. Unfortunately Josh's tapes end here.

Back in the present day, Sophie interviews a police officer who found Mark's abandoned car. It was in working condition and there was no evidence of foul play, other than a few drops of Mark's blood. He says the police investigated the case thoroughly, but reached a dead end and were forced to call it off. The officer says he always found it odd that Josh left his camera in the vehicle.

Sophie asks for the camera, and since it's no longer evidence, the officer gives it to her. She watches the tape in the camera as we flash back again. As the three teens drive along, Josh sleeps while Mark and Ashley get to know one another. They come to the mountains and pull over and take off on foot. Josh is angry that Mark and Ashley seem to be hitting it off. They come to a clearing where they see a dozen or so coyotes that've been burned to death by... something. The tape abruptly ends there.

In the present again, Sophie can't believe Josh would leave his camera in the car and not film whatever they found. She makes an incredibly intuitive leap and says there must have been a second camera. She contacts the school and asks if a video camera was checked out in 1997 and never returned, but unfortunately their records don't go back that far.

Sophie sees an interview with the former Governor, who's now recanting his statement from 1997, and says he believes the Phoenix Lights really were a UFO. She tracks down the Governor's former press agent, but he refuses to speak to her.

Her investigation at a dead end, Sophie leaves Phoenix and returns home.

Sometime later a lady from Josh's school calls Sophie, and tells her she found something. Apparently there really was a second camera (!), and someone found it in the desert and mailed it back to the school. Sophie returns to Phoenix and picks up the camera, which is scorched almost beyond recognition. Sophie's boyfriend carefully removes the tape from the burned camera, and amazingly it still plays. They watch the tape in stunned silence.

After watching the footage, Sophie sends a copy of the tape to an Air Force General. She later arranges an interview with him, but all he'll tell her is to never let the footage get out. Sophie's boyfriend asks what's next, and she says, "What do you think Josh would do?"

The final half hour or so of the film is Josh's tape. He, Ashley and Mark move past the burned coyotes, and into the rocky desert. They walk through a canyon marked with Indian petroglyphs that resemble primitive UFOs. Josh and Mark argue over Ashley. Suddenly Mark sees another object similar to the Phoenix Lights in the distance, and Josh films it. They congratulate themselves for capturing the UFO on tape a second time.

Josh wants to wait and see if the lights return, but Ashley says she has a curfew and needs to get back home. They head back toward the car, but soon become lost. They find more petrogylphs in the canyon, including odd hand prints. Ashley looks at Mark's compass, and sees the needle spinning wildly. Mark climbs a hill by himself to see if he can spot the car.

Josh and Ashley here a strange sound and are blinded by a bright light directly above them. After it disappears, Mark returns, acting oddly. They then find the car, pile in and head for home. Ashley notes that Mark looks sick, as his nose begins bleeding (which is why the police found his blood in the car). Mark insists he's OK. They see a light behind them, and think it's another car at first. It gets closer and closer, and flies over them, bathing them in bright light again. The car dies, as all of the electronics stop working. Josh and Mark push it to the side of the road, where the police will eventually find it. For some reason, Mark leaves his camera in the car.

The three teens get out and walk back toward town. Mark lags farther and farther behind, as he's clearly ill. Suddenly he runs into the desert, saying he can hear his brother (?), and Josh and Ashley chase after him. Suddenly the sky lights up again, flattening the teens. Rocks float up in the air and come crashing down. When the event is over, Mark has completely disappeared.

They search for a while, but Josh finally convinces Ashley they need to get help and come back for Mark. They spot a house in the distance, and run to it for help. Josh notices Ashley's nose is bleeding, and when she runs her hand through her hair, large chunks of it come out.

Ashley then runs ahead of Josh, saying she can hear her father. The light returns and more rocks are sucked up into the air. Josh looks up and can just make out a series of spinning rings above him. The light disappears again, and Ashley's nowhere to be found.

He runs to the house and goes inside. He looks around for a phone, and sees himself in a mirror and notices that now HIS nose is bleeding. And yes, despite the fact that his friends have been abducted and he's been attacked by the light several times, he's still filming with the goddamned camera.

The intense light shines through the windows, as everything in the house rises up. The roof is ripped off and Josh flies into the air. He's sucked into a ship as he lets go of the camera, which spins crazily before hitting the ground, where it'll be found and mailed back to the school.

Thoughts:

• There's really not a lot to say about this film. There's no message here, it brings nothing new to the table, it's not the least bit scary and there's absolutely no point to it, so this should be mercifully short.

• In case you think I'm exaggerating that this movie is nothing more than The Blair Witch Project with UFOs, just take a look at the names of Phoenix Forgotten's three main characters: Josh, Ashley and Mark. That's completely different from Blair Witch's Josh, Heather and Mike!

• The footage of the Phoenix Lights seen in the film (and allegedly shot by Josh) is actual video of the "real" event taken by an eyewitness in 1997.

As you might expect, the incident has been thoroughly debunked over the years. Most people don't realize there were actually TWO different events in Phoenix on the night of March 13, 1997. The first happened at 8:30 pm, and was the infamous "V" formation. Very few people actually saw this first event, as there was no reason for them to be staring up at the sky at that time.

Later that night around 10 pm, thousands of people who'd heard about the earlier sighting spotted a second, completely unrelated event. This sighting consisted of a line of lights that slowly sank behind the nearby Estrella Mountain range. The vast majority of witnesses confused this sighting with the earlier "V" formation, which they never actually saw.

The "V" event was later confirmed to simply be a formation of airplanes flying at high altitude, which was corrobrated by witnesses viewing them through telescopes. The second formation was a series of flares dropped by a military plane, which slowly sank to the ground.

• The found footage parts of the movie are set in 1997, so you know what that means! Anachronisms Ahoy!

At one point Josh and Ashley research historical UFO sightings in a library. Josh finds an illustration of a UFO that looks like a series of spinning rings, and say sit reminds him of the movie Contact. Ashley says that's her favorite movie, and even does a spot-on Jodie Foster impression from the film.

Supposedly the three teens when missing on March 20, 1997 (exactly one week after the Phoenix Lights incident). Contact was released on July 11 of 1997, some four months after the kids disappeared. Whoops!

After the teens disappear, billboards pop up all over Phoenix urging anyone with info to call a hotline. Unfortunately the 480 area code used on the billboard wasn't a thing in Arizona until April 1, 1999. Double whoops!

• In the film we see footage of then-Arizona Governor Fife Symington holds a televised "press conference" to mock and debunk the Phoenix Lights incident.

Later, in the present day half of the film, we see an interview of an older Fife Symington as he recants his earlier statements, saying he now believes the incident was real (insert eye roll here).

Both the press conference and later interview were actual footage of the real Fife Symington.

Fife?

• Near the end of the film, Sophie sends Josh's "lost" tape to an Air Force General. After he views it, all he has to say to her is "Don't ever let it get out."

Really? That's it? Sophie has a tape which proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that UFOs and UFO abduction are real! Wouldn't the Air Force raid her house, confiscate all her video equipment and every copy of the tape and threaten her with legal action or even incarceration if it ever leaks to the public?

Phoenix Forgotten is yet another in a long, long, LONG line of imitators inspired by The Blair Witch Project. This one tries to hide its obvious roots by adding a faux documentary to the mix, which does nothing but pad the run time. Do yourself a favor and forget about Phoenix Forgotten (see what I did there?). I give it a D+.

It Came From The Cineplex: Blair Witch

Blair Witch was written by Simon Barret and directed by Adam Wingard.

Barret and Wingard are apparently writing and directing partners, and previously brought us A Horrible Way To Die (haven't seen it), You're Next (eh), some of the segments in V/H/S and V/H/S/2 (not bad) and The Guest (didn't see it). They're also both working on an unwelcome and unwanted remake of the excellent Korean film I Saw The Devil (groan). 

As you might have guessed, Blair Witch is a sequel to 1999's The Blair Witch Project. It completely ignores the 2000 sequel Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which can only be a good thing. 

Actually, Blair Witch is more of a remake than a sequel, as it recreates the structure of the original film almost shot for shot.

I was never a huge fan of The Blair Witch Project. I thought the idea of faking "actual footage" was an interesting film experiment, but ultimately it just didn't do much for me. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer stuffy old concepts like character development, motivation and most of all, plot in the movies I watch. The Blair Witch Project had none of those, as pretty much consisted of three people wandering around in the woods and screaming at one another for eighty one minutes. Heck, if I wanna see that I'll watch my family's home movies!

The Blair Witch Project was a huge cultural event in 1999, and kicked off the whole detestable "found footage" genre that's infested cineplexes for the past seventeen years. Sure, there'd been found footage movies before (like Cannibal Holocaust), but this was the first time one had ever gotten a wide release, and played in mainstream theaters.

It also made a poop-ton of money, grossing around $250 million worldwide against its paltry $60,000 budget, making it one of the most profitable movies of all time! That's why fifteen years later we're still seeing found footage movies. They cost next to nothing to make and are pretty much guaranteed to generate millions. As much as I hate 'em, they're never gonna go away. Studios will just keep pumping them out until the day they stop making money.

The Blair Witch Project's strength was in its simplicity. It was a no-frills, stripped down tale of three hikers who get lost in the woods and meet an untimely end. The actors filmed most of the movie themselves, and their dialogue was largely improvised, giving the film a gritty authenticity. In fact many audiences actually believed the events of the film really happened.

That won't be the case with Blair Witch. The new film is much too slick and polished for even the most gullible moviegoer to ever mistake it for reality.

Another reason The Blair Witch Project felt so real was because it was plausible. There's a spooky local legend, the hikers get lost, they start turning on one another and slowly begin losing their sanity. We never see the titular Witch, and it could be argued that the threat is all in their minds. There's nothing in the movie that's outside the realm of possibility. There was a subtlety to it.

Unfortunately that all flies right out the window in Blair Witch. Everything is bigger, louder and dumber. Here the Witch is most definitely real, we get a brief shot of her horrifying, inhuman visage, and worst of all, she now has spectacularly impressive superpowers, as she's seemingly able to bend time and space to her will. This puts the movie firmly in fantasy territory. There's nothing plausible, possible or subtle about this one.

I suppose Barret and Wingard had no choice but to up the ante in this film. You can only pull off a trick like The Blair Witch Project once, and there's no fooling the audience a second time. The only solution is to try a different trick, like they did here.

I think the filmmakers were screwed either way here. If they decided not to show the Witch a second time, modern audiences would be bored to death and feel cheated. But if you do actually show her, fans of the original will cry foul. There's no way to win. Other than to skip making a sequel in the first place, and we all know that's not going to happen.

The filmmakers went to great lengths to keep the film a secret before its release. Writer Simon Barret claimed they did this because they feared an online backlash from rabid fans of the original, which could have generated negative buzz for the project (which is probably a legitimate concern).

They even went so far as to shoot the movie under the title The Woods, and even mocked up a fake poster to deflect suspicion (although the Blair Witch "stick figure" shape is right there, and not all that subtle). The film's true title was finally revealed in July of 2016 at the San Diego Comic Con, to thunderous applause. Suckers!

SPOILERS, I GUESS!

The Plot:

Back in 1994, Heather Donahue— along with her friends Josh and Mike— mysteriously disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, and have been missing ever since (as seen in The Blair Witch Project). Cut to 2014, as Heather's brother James watches newly uploaded online footage of the Blair Witch Incident. In the video he sees a brief flash of a face reflected in a mirror inside a dilapidated house. Against all reason and logic, he believes the face belongs to Heather, and the tape proves she's still alive after twenty years. Why he thinks this isn't made clear, but let's just roll with it or we'll be here all day.

Armed with this new clue, James heads to Burkittsville to find Heather. His friends Peter Jones, Ashley Bennett and film student Lisa Arlington come along for the ride. Lisa's documenting the trip for a film project, and comes fully prepared. She outfits the group with tiny, hands-free GPS-enabled ear cameras, as well as bringing a larger video camera and even a drone.

In Burkettsville, James meets with a man named Lane and his girlfriend Talia. Lane's the one who allegedly found Heather's footage and uploaded it to the internet. James believes he'll find Heather near where the tape was found, and asks Lane to give him directions. Lane refuses to tell James the location unless he lets him and Talia come along on the expedition. James reluctantly agrees.

The group enters the dense woods and hike for a few hours. As they walk along, Lane tells them about the legend of the Blair Witch. Peter thinks this is hilarious for some reason and bursts out laughing, offending Lane. They reach a shallow stream, and take off their shoes to cross. Ashley cuts her foot on a sharp rock, and James (who has some sort of first-aid training) wraps up the wound.

They decide to set up camp for the night, and pitch their tents in a convenient clearing. During the night they hear terrifying noises surrounding the camp. When they get up the next day, they discover they've all inexplicably slept until 2pm. Um... scary, I guess? They also see the tree limbs are decorated with wooden stick figures tied together with twine.

Ashley freaks out when she sees the figures and demands they go home. The others agree, and strike the camp and leave. As they're walking back, Lisa notices a roll of twine sticking out of Lane's backpack, and accuses him of making the stick figures. He admits he made them, as well as faking the footage on the tape, and says he and Talia have never been in these woods before. Angry, James tells Lane and Talia to find their own way back and chase them off.

James and the others hike for several more hours, but somehow arrive back at their campsite. Lisa launches her drone to try and get an aerial view, but it begins glitching and crashes into a tree. Ashley's foot becomes infected and she develops a high fever. With dark approaching, they're forced to camp in the woods a second night.

Peter leaves the camp to gather firewood (because the abundant branches surrounding the camp apparently aren't good enough) and hears strange noises. He begins running wildly through the woods and is crushed by a falling tree. James goes looking for him, but only finds his abandoned flashlight next to the tree.

James, Lisa and Ashley hear more horrifying sounds outside their tents during the night. A very haggard looking and disheveled Lane and Talia appear, claiming they've been wandering the woods for five days. Lane then runs off into the woods, leaving Talia behind. 

The next morning Lisa's alarm goes off, but the group is puzzled to see the sun hasn't risen. They see the camp is surrounded by even more stick figures, and Talia freaks out when she sees one woven with clumps of her own hair (?). Ashley blames Talia for Peter's disappearance, and grabs the stick figure from her. She snaps it in two, which causes Talia's body to contort and fold in half, killing her instantly. So I guess they're like voodoo dolls?

The Smoke Monster from LOST, er, I mean an invisible force then attacks the camp, smashing trees and tossing their tents high in the air. James and the others run for their lives. Ashley gets separated from them and sits down to rest. She examines her infected leg and pulls some sort of worm from the wound, for no reason than to inject a bit of gore into the film. She then spots the damaged drone high in a tree, and decides she's gotta have it, no matter what. Despite the fact that she was barely able to hobble along a few seconds earlier, she somehow she climbs high into the tree with cat-like agility. As she reaches for the drone she slips and falls several hundred feet, and her body's dragged away by the unseen force.

As a thunderstorm erupts, James and Lisa find the house from Lane's video. James thinks he sees Heather in an upper window (?) and rushes inside. We're then treated to several minutes of vertigo-inducing shots of him frantically running through hallways in the house. Lisa sees a bizarre shape outside the house and reluctantly runs inside. She ends up in the basement, where she's attacked by an insane and bearded Lane. He throws her into a tunnel beneath the basement (??). She crawls through the muddy tunnel— becoming momentarily stuck a few times— and eventually exits into the basement (???). Lane attacks again and she stabs him in the neck with her camping knife. She runs into James, and they head upstairs. As they do, we briefly see the same reflected face that James saw in the tape— the one he thought was Heather—  indicating there's some timey-whimey shenanigans going on in the house. They make it to the attic and lock the door.

A bright light shines through the cracks of the house, as the movie briefly becomes Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. James, who's suddenly become an expert on the Blair Witch, orders Lisa to stand in a corner and close her eyes, saying they'll be safe as long as they don't look directly at the Witch, as we now begin referencing Raiders Of The Lost Ark. 

The attic door's forced open, and the Witch enters. She does her best vocal impression of Heather, which causes James to turn around and see her, and he's instantly killed. Lisa uses her camcorder screen to try and walk backwards out of the house without looking at the Witch. She almost makes it, but then she hears "James" call out, and like an idiot turns around and is killed. Her camera drops to the floor and the screen goes black, as the audience sits in confusion for a few seconds, unsure of whether the movie's over or not.

Thoughts:

• The movie takes place in 2014, a full twenty years after Heather disappeared. So why the hell is James convinced that she's still alive? Does he really think his sister's been wandering around the woods for two decades, trying to find her way out? That must be one damned big forest! Does he think she learned to hunt and kill animals to survive, and how to fashion clothing from their skins?

I'm also not clear as to why he thinks the blurry face in a single frame of a grainy online video is unequivocally her, when it's impossible to tell who the hell it's supposed to be.

I get that the filmmakers wanted a connection with the first movie, but James' Ahab-like obsession with a sister he didn't even know (he was supposedly only four years old when she disappeared) was just plain bad writing. It might have worked if this film had come out a year after the original, or was set in 2000. But twenty years later? Nope.

• Peter mentions that he was part of the search party that scoured the woods for Heather after she disappeared in 1994. Um… Peter looks to be about the same age as James, which means he was four years old when Heather went missing. Did they really bring a four year old on a search party? And if they did, would he really remember anything about it? How much do you remember from when you were four?

• One of my biggest complaints about the found footage genre (besides the lack of acting talent, special effects, production design and plot) is the fact that invariably the characters will continue filming everything, even when they should be tossing the camera to the ground and running for their lives.

Credit where credit's due: Blair Witch addresses this problem by providing the four leads with tiny, wireless ear-mounted cameras. Now their hands will be free as they're avoiding angry witches while running blindly through the woods. Well done!

Of course I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't point out that the Ashley character wears one of these ear cameras under her impressive shock of thick, curly hair. Yet somehow her camera consistently has an unobstructed view!

• Jesus Christ, this movie set a new record for jump scares. I finally stopped counting them at ten, and there were several more after that. In fact after two or three of them in a row, one of the characters actually tells another to "Stop doing that!" When the characters start commenting on how excessive the jump scares are in their own movie, there just might be a few too many.

When are directors ever going to learn that jump scares are not, well, scary? If you can't think of a better way to try and frighten your audience than by yelling "BOO!" at them, then maybe you'd be better off making a romantic comedy.

• Earlier I said The Blair Witch Project had a certain subtlety to it. Heather and her friends hear a twig snap outside their tent, and they freeze in terror. I saw the film in the theater, and the entire audience (including me) was leaning forward during that scene, desperately straining to pick up any stray noises on the soundtrack. The uncertainty of whether there was really something there or not is what made it scary.

Cut to Blair Witch. Lisa says, "Did you hear that?" Suddenly a sound like a herd of elephants trampling the microphone blares from the speakers, trees snap in half and fall, and some unseen force rips the tents from the ground and hurls them upwards into the sky. It's not quite the same.

• As the group enters the Black Hills Forest, Lane tells the others that no one ever enters this particular woods, and it's completely untouched. Oddly enough, he says this while they're walking along a nice, cleared trail that winds through the trees.

• I mentioned this in the plot, but it deserves repeating. During the second day of the trip, Ashley's foot is badly infected, she has a severe fever and she's barely able to rise out of bed and hobble along.

Yet the second she sees the drone in the tree, this woman who looks like she's never even been in a forest before can suddenly climb like a lumberjack. She climbs up at least a hundred feet, constantly placing all her weight on her swollen foot with no ill effects. Maybe the Witch used her time-manipulating powers to speed up Ashley's healing when we weren't looking?

• The film sets up a bunch of things that seem like they're going to be important, but are promptly dropped and never pan out.

Lane admits that he and Talia made the stick figures and hung them in the camp, but we never find out just why they do this. Are they trying to prank James and his friends by dragging them out in the woods and scaring the crap out of them? Are they working with the Witch, and providing her with victims? That would be an interesting idea, but I guess it's none of our business as the issue is never dealt with.

After the gang hears the scary noises during the first night in the woods, they attach a small security camera to a tree to monitor the camp. When the noises recur the next night, no one thinks to check the camera to see what was causing it.

Lisa brings a drone so the group can hopefully spot the house from the air. It feels like this drone's going to play a big role in the plot, but it's used a couple of times and then forgotten.

Talia freaks out when she sees one of the stick figures has some of her hair woven into it. Ashley angrily grabs the figure from her and breaks it in two. This somehow causes Talia's body to be gruesomely folded in half, killing her. Again, this "voodoo doll" thing was an interesting idea, but it flies against everything that was previously established. It was pulled straight out of the screenwriter's ass, with absolutely no justification or foreshadowing. And then like everything else it's promptly dropped, never to be mentioned again.

Ashley sits down on a log to examine her infected foot. She then pulls some… thing out of a festering hole in her calf. It looks for all the world like a squirming alien creature. She looks at it in horror for a few seconds and then tosses it away from her in disgust. And that's the end of that! We never find out what the hell the creature was or what it was doing in her leg. Was it an alien? Is the Witch an alien as well? That would certainly explain a lot, like the time travel and the bright lights at the end.

• In the original film, the locals say that in the 1780s and old woman named Elly Edward was accused of witchcraft, tied to the trunk of a tree in the Black Hills Forest and left to die. Her spirit returned and cursed anyone who entered the woods.

Suddenly in this movie we're told that Elly was strung up in a tree with heavy rocks tied to her hands and feet, which stretched out her limbs to unnatural proportions before she died.

So which is it, movie? Tied or stretched?

In the third act we get a very brief glimpse of the Witch as it lurks behind Lisa, and its arms and legs are freakishly elongated. In fact it looks more like some kind of alien than a witch. Is that look supposed to be the result of her limbs being stretched by the rocks as she hung from the trees?

• At the end of the film, James suddenly becomes an expert on the Blair Witch and her rules. When he and Lisa are trapped in the attic with the Witch, he tells her to stand in a corner and close her eyes, as catching even a glimpse of her will instantly kill them. And it works! The Witch is seemingly powerless against them as long as they follow these rules.

That's fine and all, but how the hell did James know any of this? A few hours earlier he poo-pooed the notion that she existed at all, and the minute he enters the house he starts figuring out loopholes in her powers.

• The big twist in Blair Witch is that the video that James sees at the beginning of the movie— that kicked off the whole "Search For Heather" expedition— is actually the footage filmed by Lisa's camera in the final scenes.

Apparently the Witch took Lisa's camera, tossed it outside the house, and then used her superpowers to send it back into time so Lane would find it and upload it to the internet.

For someone who lived in the 1780s, the Blair Witch has a remarkably savvy understanding of modern technology and time travel.

Why she would send a tape back in time, and why she seemingly has a vendetta against James' family, is apparently none of our concern.

• Unintentionally hilarious moment: During the end credits there's a caption that reads, "Costume Design by Katia Stano."

That must have been a tough job. I bet she spent all of an hour grabbing clothes off the rack at Dick's Sporting Goods or Gander Mountain.

Blair Witch is big, loud and dumb, and lacks all the subtlety that made the original so influential. It trades plausibility for impossibility, as it even throws time travel into the mix! If you like watching characters wander through the forest and shriek one another's names, then this is the film for you. Stay out of this woods, and go watch the original again. I was going to give it a C-, but ultimately decided on a D+ for completely missing the point of the first film, and because I hate found footage films.