Blair Witch Review: 7 Ups And 3 Downs

1. It's The Good Kind Of Legacy-quel

As the legacy-quel craze has become seemingly the only way to make a late-in-the-day sequel in modern Hollywood (unless you're Ghostbusters), they've been divided into three categories; lazy redos (Independence Day: Resurgence), lazy-but-fun redos (Jurassic Park) and redos that have something more to say (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Creed). Thankfully, Blair Witch is (mostly - as always, I'll get to that) in the latter camp.

In some ways it's surprising that this is a legacy-quel at all - you'd expect something a bit more novel after that marketing - but Wingard works his usual genre cliché twist magic and the result is a top level one.

What's important to remember when approaching this new subset of movies is that they can't just coast on nostalgia. Yes, a film of this type should include plenty of references for the fans, but it needs to also have its own, unique forward momentum, taking itself in new directions and also serving as a standalone flick, which is exactly what Blair Witch does; the expanded mythology certainly shows the former, and trust me when I say it can work by itself.

But, like the film's camping trip, it isn't a total success. Let's take a look at the film's Downs.