For those of you have have never let yourself in to have a look around and hopefully not steal any of my belongings, there is a tab on this theme called ‘the team’. The Team currently consist of myself and yet to announce herself via posting – JB – who may or may not still be in hibernation because she may or may not be a bear waiting to come out of her sleep and start killing her prey to feed her young. I also may or may not be old enough to be her grandfather and, if that’s the case, she may or may not be far too wise to bear witness to the stinking miasma of movies I’ve subjected her to over the years but she may or may not still be hanging in there with me despite her better or worse judgement. For today’s installment of this Spring Festival of Rebirth and Witches Cutting Off Our Heads and Cooking Them in Pies 2021, we have a look around the haunted dead trees of Burkittsville and try to figure out just what the fuck is going on with all of those people screaming and crying in the woods. She also may or may not still be giving me the finger for asking her to watch all of those Amityville movies (coming someday to Film Miasma!)

FM: flick flick flick flick flickety flick flick whizzzzzzzzzzzzz thumathumathumathuma (you see, my found footage is on a 35mm projectors because I’m so godammed old) This has got to be one of the more irritating movies I’ve seen in a long fucking time. I’m about 45 minutes  in and nothing at all has happened except for a lot of nonsense screaming about nothing, bad improvised dialogue and  just some weird sounds offscreen that offer no value. I would think that any sensible human being, when hearing a noise in the bushes, would hunker down and prepare to fight and not run blindly screaming into the dark, cold woods where the sound is coming from. Plus, if I were any member of that trio, I would have told the other two to FUCK OFF and left long ago. And it’s not even in fucking HD. At 59 minutes in, Heather is screaming the word ‘Josh’ so loudly and so close to the camera’s microphone that it makes me want to fucking puke. I’m really starting to wonder why I’m doing this to myself. God damn, that’s the end? Guess how much I liked this movie? SPOILER: I didn’t.

JB: click pop, eeeeeejct fffsssh zzzzzzzp whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (DVD) Found footage is not the easiest thing to watch – usually a really shitty camera, or a decent one, but there is so much movement going on your head spins and you don’t have all the time in the world to follow everything, and a lot of things get lost in the hurry and confusion. Me? I like things to come together deliberately. Now all of that aside, The Blair Witch Project still holds up pretty well. Heather is an absolute bitch. She is headstrong and rude and egotistical to boot, and she is right all the time and can never be wrong and is so… no. She got on my damn nerves, and I got why Mike and Josh got so annoyed with her. Now, it must be said that the movie is far longer than it absolutely needs to be. Like, way too long. It could have been half this length and probably told exactly the same story, which would have worked out far better, I reckon. Well, just some editing. Take this down to an hour. That’s a big thing with FF – it just drags on way longer than it should. I didn’t want to yank my teeth out, at any rate.

JB: eeejecccccctt click pop, eeeeeejct fffsssh zzzzzzzp whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (DVD) Well, the best thing about this movie, without a doubt, was Marilyn Manson’s Disposable Teens and later on Rob Zombie’s Dragula. For reals, at least there was something good to listen to. The soundtrack overall is probably not too bad and the least offensive thing about this movie. On to the actual movie. The performances! Dear lord, the performances! They were a particular brand of wtf, not to mention the character logic. It astounded me immensely, and was beyond questionable, even for a horror movie. Our main peanut that we watch, good old Jeffery, is mad as a hatter. Like seriously, this guy has some issues, and we never get to see more about his cuckoo past, which is a disappointment. Actually, scratch that, is probably isn’t a disappointment, because I am sure they would have cocked that up too. Book of Shawdows is a typically messy, cheap cash grab, a practice which is yet to die out. Not the worst of the worst, but by no means a movie that you need to seek out. I think it might get a little more hate than necessary, too. It is not worth the eternal scorn I keep reading about. 

FM: (reloads reels) flickety flickety flick flick flickety flick flick whizzzzzzzzzzzzz thumathumathumathumathumathuma I start watching this on HBO the other day for this and it sucks so bad I can’t even concentrate. Jeffrey Donovan is absolutely miserable (I loved him in Fargo Season 2), I thought I liked Kim Director but she sucks here, the non-HD shaky cam is gross, there are enormous problems with the story and the sometimes-useful use of time trickery in film just doesn’t work. Like my good friend once said, “if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a fucking pig.” This movie is the epitome of a shit-eating pig with lipstick on it. Here’s my spoiler summary: SUCK. I remember I once defended this thing as “I didn’t think it was THAT bad” but this is a real piece of dirty shitpaper. JB has always given me a word or two about letting some bad things pass as decent but this one stinks. Burn this one with fire. When you were a kid, was there a story in the neighborhood you grew up in about how other kids would gather up some dog crap, stick it in a paper bag, light that on fire on someone’s doorstep and the ring the doorbell and run off? The point was that someone would open the door and stomp it out and get burning dog poop all over the place. That was too long of an analogy but –> yep.

FM: whizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz flick flick flick flick thump thump thump thump When the trailer for this movie first came out, I believe it was called “The Woods”,  made by the team that did “You’re Next” and “The Guest”, this looked nut-busting awesome and seemed like it would be a big winner. Then they called it Blair Witch and it went straight to streaming so… did anyone’s nuts bust here? The answer to that is a big, blue balls no for this wretched movie. What the FUCK? This was totally stupid from start to finish, I don’t know about JB but I wanted to kill all of the characters as well as the writer and director, and then they threw in one of the worst fucking CGI creatures I’ve ever seen. Also – I think there was something going on with a spaceship. Or something. And some time travel. I think. I couldn’t have cared less. You know the routine. A bunch of dopes go into the woods. They hear a bunch of shit noises. They go into an old house. They eat shit and die.

JB: click click click (uses modern technology to stream live) You know, I mistakenly thought that things couldn’t go further downhill with these movies than that Book of Shadows crap. I was sooooo wrong. Wingard is a director that a lot of people fawn about. For me, outside of The Guest (of which I still have an indecent obsession), I am not totally in love. Him and Barrett aren’t bad, they are a little different, and I like that, but I don’t think they are like the Second Coming or anything. So I didn’t expect to hate this (shit, I even liked Death Note, though I will likely be butchered for even saying that), but I did. There. I said it.

Blair Witch is so fucking messy and upside down and stupid and cringy and NO. So much no. Initially I was really interested in the concept of Heather’s brother still wanting to know what happened to her all those years ago, and wanted to see what would happen. Instead we have icky dialogue, the characters I cared least about in the whole series, and then… the Witch/Spindly-Legged-Spider-Alien. Like… guys? Help? So we had alien witch things and outside light ups and arms in trees slapping people around, Prohibition tunnels, tents getting ripped up, and people being snapped like twigs. Uhm… sure. So all of that makes it sound like a lot of crazy stuff was going on and that it was at least worth a watch, right? Wrong. 

And that’s a wrap! I’d like to generously thank JB for once again partnering up with me for something like this, even though the movies stank. She lives a long, long way away so I can only imagine that besides flipping me off, she may or may not have packed up all of her things in a blanket, tied it to the end of stick and hit the road. That also may or may not be just be a United States thing and she may or may not know what the fuck I’m talking about but, nevertheless, I offer up sincere thanks and gratitude! For the record, I think it’s called a Great Depression Bundle and it looks something like this (my eyes suck so I can’t see what’s in that bag but you can replace that with something like: a chicken leg, some soiled underwear for washin’ later, one or two pairs of ratty socks with holes in them and probably some sort of tin bowl for collecting rain and maybe heating some beans off of a car radiator):

Filed under: MIASMA COLLECTIONS