Director: Adam Wingard
Running Time: 89 mins
Certificate: 15
Release Date: January 23rd 2017 (UK)
When it was announced at Comic Con that Adam Wingard’s The Woods (which already had a bit of hype about it even though no one knew much about it) was actually a sequel to The Blair Witch Project, it seemed a bit of a masterstroke of marketing. Immediately a movie that might otherwise have elicited shrugs and accusations of cashing in on a dead franchise, instead jumped to the top of horror fanboys interest lists.
Now though it’s starting to seem like it might have worked a little too well, as it raised the hype level so high that unless the actual movie turned out to be a surprising and zeitgeist-capturing as the original 1999 film, it was bound to be seen as disappointing. And that’s just what happened when it was released in cinemas, with most people seeing it as more of remake than a sequel – and it was actually outgrossed by the almost universally derided earlier follow-up, Book Of Shadows. [Read more…]