Rating: D-
Dir: Arturs Latkovskis
Star: Arturs Latkovskis, Veronika Rumjanceva, Alina Sedova, Vladislavs Filipovs
“Why are we watching this?” complained Chris loudly. Well, because you stated the other Latvian candidate, Squeal, was definitely not a horror movie. “But this is just a Blair Witch rip-off! Why are you making me sit through this shaky-cam?” So I ended up watching this entry by myself, and there’s no doubt about it: Chris got the better end of the deal. For it is just a Blair Witch rip-off, one of the worst it has been my misfortune to see, and makes little effort to hide it. For the film opens with this caption: “One year ago, five friends went on a trip and never returned. This edited video was found on one of the forums in Deep Web.” Oh, god…
Rather than investigating a local legend, this is a straightforward canoeing trip. For the first 27 minutes (and the film runs less than 72, end to end), that’s all you get: canoeing, camping, a momentary discussion of “bad spirits”, and a pyramid made of wood. It’s like watching somebody else’s interminable, crappy holiday video, and with absolutely no reason to care about anyone involved, you don’t. An unexpected Gordon Ramsay reference is about as interesting as it gets. Guess he’s a big deal in Latvia. It gets dark, and almost impossible to see anything – a situation not helped by certain footage literally being shot on somebody’s phone. Eventually, we discover that the area was settled by pagans in the pre-Christian era, and there’s a stone nearby where human sacrifices took place.
Weirdly, in the middle of the night, there’s a shot of a pagan hand burying a runestone outside a tend, and the next morning, the visitors find a doll nailed to a tree. But we then resume your regularly scheduled nothing happening, interrupted by low-energy canoeing. We cruise into the second half of the movie in a fundamentally not very interesting mode, where the biggest threat is a low branch. I was beginning to think that this was even less of a horror movie than Squeal. We are 49 minutes in, when we reach the sacrificial altar, and guess what? Nothing happens, except finding a boat with a rune on its prow. More canoeing and camping ensues.
Finally, we are past the hour mark – so, with barely ten minutes left – before creepy bell-ringing and sounds outside their tents are heard. Part of me is reluctant to spoiler the climax, being what little the film is going for it, but I have genuinely no fucks to give any more. Pagans show up and kill the entire party. Well, I guess they do, considering the camerawork is so execrable it’s impossible to be sure who is doing what, and to whom. I think my main takeaway from this whole dreadful ordeal is perhaps a new appreciation for the elements The Blair Witch Project got right. Because it’s clear on the basis of this, that the found-footage genre can be an awful lot worse.