By Simon Thompson
Paul A Brooks’s Hunting For The Hag is a movie that I would describe as being about as enjoyable as being forced to drink a whole bottle of sriracha at knifepoint. It’s a lacklustre and disappointing cross between found-footage horror and a traditional three-act narrative, with so much shaky- cam that the filmmakers should be obliged to put some kind of sea sickness warning on the poster.
The plot of Hunting For The Hag is as boilerplate as it possibly gets, focuses on Tara (Jasmine Williams), a young documentary filmmaker who travels to the woods of Central Illinois to capture footage of the Hawthorne Hag, a mysterious local legend somewhere between Big-Foot and Gawker’s journalistic integrity on the mythical creature index. Tara brings her two most patience sapping friends along for the ride, as the three women discover that there is indeed something terrifying lurking within the woods.
Hunting For The Hag has three strikes working against it. Strike one is that the three main characters are all obnoxious, and ditzy, and can seemingly only communicate in shrieks. All three of them are so tiresome it reached a point where I was actively rooting for the Deliverance via Resident Evil VII rednecks that kidnap them to finish the job and kill them off. Strike two is that all the characters in Brooks’ and co-writer Sierra Renfro’s script come across less like real people and more like stock characteristics on a casting call sheet, to the extent that I knew almost everything that both the protagonists and antagonists were going to do before it was even shown- killing any suspense whatsoever.
Finally, strike three is that Brooks’s direction seemingly can’t hold a shot making it difficult to establish any atmosphere or tension. This is a problem that many movies in the found-footage subgenre seem to struggle with and Hunting For The Hag is no different. When you compare this movie to the one that started this entire sub-genre, The Blair Witch Project, the reason why that movie works and this one doesn’t is that Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s direction revolved around creating a quiet stillness, rarely cutting and employing a static approach to the camera enhancing the isolated situation that the characters are in. Brooks does the exact opposite – constantly moving the camera to the point where it just becomes an obtrusive distraction to compensate for his lack of ability to create a naturally intimidating tone.
Overall Hunting For The Hag has very little to recommend. It’s a soulless, vapid, and generic affair which neither does something new with the horror genre nor executes it’s tried and tested tropes well. If you do want to spend an hour and twenty-five minutes in the company of three of the most moronic and tiresome protagonists I’ve ever come across (short of the entire cast of that one McDonald’s advert where everyone raises their eyebrows) then boy have I got a movie for you.
Bloody Flicks 