The Curator of Schlock #216 by Jeff Shuster

Blair Witch

That Blair Witch will tear you a new one.

I don’t care if some of you didn’t think my Last Witch Hunter review was thorough enough. I don’t care. I’m not part of the Wiki-generation. I don’t get 35th Dolans or witch counsels or the twelve Infinity Stones or whatever. That stuff is for nerds, man. I like my movies simple. There’s a monster in the woods. It kills college students. No one survives.

The end.

That was the plot of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project and it is also the plot of the 2016 follow-up documentary, Blair Witch.

We don’t cover too many documentaries here at The Museum of Schlock. We showcased The King of Kong a few years back. I know Billy Mitchell is in some trouble over some slander by jealous losers who think he got his Donkey Kong score while playing on a MAME emulator. Bollocks. Get a life, losers.

Billy Mitchell is a winner and always will be. Hot sauce champion, Pac-Man champion, and Donkey Kong champion of the world.

Anyway, I’ve seen other documentaries like that one about the Blair Witch back in the late 90s. The nation was obsessed with those college students who got lost in the Maryland woods, cussed a lot, and got lost never to be seen again. Everyone assumed that, based on the found footage, that the Blair Witch killed them, but this isn’t true. Heather Donahue escaped those woods and outsmarted the Blair Witch because I saw her promoting Steak ‘n Shake restaurants on TV. Whenever I tell this to people, they just roll their eyes at me.

Heather must have started up a new life for herself because even her younger brother, James Donahue, still thought she was lost in those woods. (She’s doing Steak ‘n Shake commercials, James! Why am I the only one who notices these things?) Anyway, James discovered some footage being posted online of his sister, Heather, still stuck in those woods near Burkittsville, MD.

It’s not her, dude. She’s doing Steak ‘n Shake commercials!

Sigh.

James is a paramedic. I guess his family didn’t get any royalties from The Blair Witch Project. Or maybe Heather is still collecting them under an assumed name all these years later. Who knows? Point is James wants to go into those woods and rescue his sister and drags along a student documentarian named Lisa Arlington, his best friend, Peter Jones, Peter’s girlfriend, Ashley, and a couple of Burkittsville burnouts named Talia and Lane. Talia has purple hair. That’s a red flag right there.

So like bad stuff happens from here on out. You’d think anyone who watched the first documentary would know better than to go into those woods, but this is the iPad generation and they probably didn’t have the attention span to sit through the whole 81 minutes. And Lisa, all of your fancy micro SD cards and GPS devices and flying drone cameras are no match for the Blair Witch, who I think, as it turns out, may be an extra terrestrial. Oh, and Ashley cuts her foot on a rock while they’re crossing a river and I think a centipede burrows it’s way up through the open wound.

If that’s not your idea of a good time, you’d best stay away from this documentary.

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.