jfilmer-544-494694

Being in the "biz" it was more or less evident to me that this film was unfinished and it's a shame that it was released this way since it had the potential to be a decent B horror flick.

Aside from some unremarkable acting (which is excusable when dealing with low budget horrors) the score and cinematography were competently executed. Make-up and special effects were decent aside from one horrendous CGI shot of snow. Where we get into trouble is in the edit.

An unforgivable number of scenes were disjointed and leaves the audience wondering "what is going on," "where am I now" or "who am I looking at?" I've seen such scenes before in what we call an assembly or rough cut. This is when the editor takes his/her first stab at a complete edit. It's usually after this that the production team gets a clear idea of what scenes need to be re-shot or what extra shots are needed to make the edit work or flow.

For whatever reason (lack of funding, actor availability, location no longer available, etc.) this was clearly not done which makes the film extremely frustrating to follow.

I recommend staying clear of this one. I'm a huge fan of horror films but I ended up fast forwarding the last 10 minutes just to get to the end because my brain got tired of trying to fill in the gaps.

Many factors contributed to the overwhelming success of Blair Witch including marketing, writing, directing and the most crucial aspect, acting. Unfortunately the acting here is sub-par which isn't to say that the leads didn't do their jobs well but on more than one occasion, it felt like a college drama ad-lib class and having just one of those moments, let alone several, destroys any illusion that this is a real documentary. In real life, people talk over each other as they scream and argue. They do not wait for someone to finish speaking. Blair Witch knew and hit this aspect on the mark.

Another real deal breaker was just the immaturity of the lead characters, not to mention any real character development. I honestly got fed up with them both for being both stupid and passive and began rooting for the ghost about halfway through the film. The fact is: no one likes a weak main character in a horror film. The only thing they are good for is fodder for the baddies.

Finally, the pacing of the film was really poor. Sporadic moments of terror and fright that never really felt like anything was building up, especially with so much downtime and extraneous exposition in between the scares.

All in all, a decently creepy low budget film with good effects but substandard writing and unsympathetic, childish characters. C+/B-.