The horror movie The Objective, which follows a group of American forces soldiers led by a poker-faced CIA man on a mysterious mission into the mountains of Afghanistan, has been greeted as a comeback for its director, Daniel Myrick, who hit paydirt nine years ago as the one of the directors of The Blair Eitch Project. So it's a little surprising and more than a little dispiriting when you begin to notice that the new movie is really very much like Blair Witch minus its found-footage gimmick, which is sorely missed. Once again, we're out in a remote, ominously creepy location that seems all the creepier when the landscape seems to begin to change. And once again, we're stuck out there with a small group of characters who start out overconfident and become more and more unglued as something starts picking them off. Although this movie had a written script (by Myrick, Mark A. Patton, and Wesley Clark, Jr., it even has the same kind of numbingly uninspired and repetitive dialogue, which is made to seem all the flatter by the uninflected non-acting of the principles. (There's also a voice-over narration droned by the CIA guy: "Maybe this is what it takes--getting completely lost first before you can find what you're looking for." The charitable may assume this is meant as a parody of Apocalypse Now.)

Myrick's Blair Witch co-director, Eduardo Sanchez, actually did a much snazzier job of direction on his aliens-among-us horror comedy, Altered, but that movie went straight to DVD, maybe as punishment for its not having a War-on-Terror setting to imbue the proceedings with an air of phony relevance. The Objective does turn out to have a punchline waiting for those who manage to make it through the tedium. It's not wholly coherent, but it seems to suggest that the original expert on al=Qaeda might have been Erich von Daniken. But a punchline with a sprinkling of gore do not a midnight movie classic make.