If you want to know about the real curse of the Blair Witch, Ed Sanchez is living through it right now. Almost a decade on from the release of directorial debut THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (TBWP), costing $35,000 to produce and grossing over $250,000,000 worldwide, nothing Sanchez touches will escape critical comparison with this defining work.
In fairness to we critics, Sanchez isn't exactly making it difficult for us. ALTERED, his new film, sees a clutch of guys (and a token gal) holed up in some rustic corner of the great American outback, at odds with an unearthly tormentor whose insidious presence turns our protagonists gradually against one another. Sound vaguely familiar? Would it help if I told you that this is where the similarity ends, that ALTERED trades the narrative spontaneity and sinister, suggestive power of TBWP for a deft little script and some nifty special effects? Probably not.
There are other, more superficial distinctions. In ALTERED the villain of the piece is not a witch but a visitor from outer space, an alien who - in a simple and satisfying reversal of roles - is quickly abducted by three gun-toting Florida hicks. We soon learn that this is by way of retribution for some transgression that took place fifteen years ago, resulting in the death of a childhood friend and the ruin of each of their respective backwater lives.
Duke (Brad William Henke), Cody (Paul Boyington-McCarthy Jr) and Otis (Michael C. Williams) whisk the alien off to a lock-up owned by their friend Wyatt (Adam Kaufman) and his girlfriend Hope (Catherine Mangan), and try to lie low on the off-chance that none of its extra terrestrial travelling companions will come looking for it. However, as the night wears on the abductee begins to manipulate its captors, turning them against one another and bending them to its will, we move inexorably towards a spectacular... nerve-shredding... finale?
Ok, ok, so I've only seen the first 57 minutes (see 'My first time at the drive-in' to find out why). And maybe I'm doing Sanchez a terrible injustice, having the temerity to review his movie without watching it in its entirety. Or maybe it's you, my beloved readers, who are being sold short, and ALTERED comes apart in the last half hour in a way that has to be seen to be believed. At least the latter might explain the distributor's decision to send ALTERED it straight-to-DVD. With 57 minutes under my belt I find this decision incomprehensible (as, it would seem, does Sanchez - who, it must be hoped, has watched the film in its entirety).
True, ALTERED has a slightly glossy made-for-TV feel more akin to an uberseries like INVASION, exemplified by the presence of the assured and implausibly attractive Kaufman, a veteran of Steven Spielberg's TAKEN. But far worse movies than this have mustered a theatrical release, however limited, and none of them could boasted of having been brought to you by one of the directors of TBWP.
Make no mistake, ALTERED is a B-movie, but not the C-movie TBWP would have been if Sanchez and his 'crew' hadn't struck improvised gold as they led their bewildered 'cast' a merry dance through Maryland forest. Confined by the strictures of script and special effects budget, ALTERED is the work of a man feeling his way towards something like the normal film-making process. When he arrives, he might bless us with a grade-A feature, something with the power and production values of Ridley Scott's ALIEN or John Carpenter's THE THING, something compact, claustrophic, performance-driven. Failing this, falling victim to his own preposterously front-loaded success, he may come to be regarded as one of cinema's one-trick ponies, albeit one of the cruellest and most brilliant tricks ever played.
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