‘Blair Witch’ 2016 set to spook

I love camping.

It gives me the chance to disconnect from the wired world, immersing myself in the great outdoors, reconnecting with nature and trying to purge my brain of having to suffer through films like "Blair Witch."

I fell hard for the original “Blair Witch Project,” as it was given to me as an unmarked cassette by a friend who actually screened it at Sundance in 1999 to an unsuspecting midnight audience. The world was nowhere near as connected as it is today, and the brilliant marketing team at Artisan Entertainment was able to fleece audiences with a makeshift internet page (that is still available) with phony press clippings of the original "filmmakers" disappearance.

It was a lightning-in-a-bottle phenomenon that was genuinely creepy and incredibly effective, which all were quick to capitalize on, which led to the ill-fated sequel "Book of Shadows" the following year that tanked both critically and commercially. For at that point, there was no more mystique of the "real or fake" debate that propelled the first film and it was left to delve into a hacky look into the world of the fabled "witch."

A planned third film never materialized based on the disastrous reception. Flash forward 16 years and a closely guarded film from acclaimed horror director Adam Wingard ("You're Next,” "The Guest") called "The Woods" screened at San Diego's Comic Con, where it was revealed to be a true sequel to the film. Rumor was that this was the worthy successor for which fans of the original were clamoring.

And either that early praise was a publicity stunt that was as crafty as anything in the original film or the midnight audience was so sleep deprived that they would have been entertained by a laser pointer on a blank wall. Either way, that early hype was way off base, as "Blair Witch" is one of the biggest missed opportunities in recent memory.

Let's start with the premise: James (played by James Allen McCune), the college-age brother of "Project's" protagonist Heather, rallies a bunch of his buddies to the same woods in which his sibling disappeared. Think about that timeline for a second. Heather was a film student in the first film which was supposed to take place in 1994, making her about 20. She would now be about 42. James is college age himself in this sequel, which would mean there is about a 20-year gap between when they were each conceived, and he was about 2 or 3 when his sister disappeared.

I'm not saying that's impossible, but it's certainly stretching the foundational logic to its threads.

He's joined by a group of cardboard cutouts of horror stereotypes: girlfriend Lisa (played by Callie Hernandez), buddy Peter (played by Brandon Scott) and his girlfriend Ashley (played by Corbin Reid). They meet a freaky local couple who accompany their trek into the fabled woods.

They are all armed with the latest camera technology: mini head cameras that resemble Bluetooth earpieces, a drone, and multiple GoPros that document every waking (and sometimes sleeping) moment. And despite this updated technology (and countless other "found footage" horror films in the last couple decades) director Wingard fails to capitalize on how to effectively use it. He instead relies on a frustratingly large number of "jump scares" that shift the action from pitch-black silence to loud shots of a someone fumbling with a camera's mic or, worse yet, someone walking out of the darkness merely to say "hi" to the person filming.

These types of jolts are cheap, lazy and far beneath a director who has displayed such a loving devotion to the genre in his previous films. Also, the film dabbles with elements of body horror in which one character cuts her foot and appears to have a living creature that somehow slipped inside, but once it is extracted, there is no reason nor explanation of it whatsoever. And the film’s attempts to alter shifts in time toward the climax come across as a hollow narrative convenience.

There is no attempt to make the characters display even the most basic of chemistry, and they may as well have introduced themselves as numbers to signify the order in which they will all die.

September is traditionally the perfect time for spookier fare as we creep into the Halloween spirit, but "Blair Witch" only conjures up the spirit of the original that was far more effective and thoughtful than anything found in this return trip to the woods.