Blair Witch Project
1
It is almost impossible to watch a movie objectively. The viewer brings with him/her, consciously or not, expectations and personal feelings which it is absolutely impossible not to apply to what he/she is watching. This is as it should be. A film I love, others may hate. A film I think is one of the worst ever made, a lot of other people may enjoy. I'll give you an example: I think "The Blair Witch Project" is one of the worst ever made! A lot of other people enjoyed it. See how it works? I, too, heard the hype. I couldn't wait to see this movie, and actually the first two times I tried, it was sold out. I finally had to go to an afternoon matinee. After I saw the movie, I was more confused than annoyed. I had heard it was "scary", "terrifying", and so on. Had I seen a different cut of the movie? Maybe I fell asleep without knowing it and missed the scary stuff? So I went to see it again. Then, once more, on home video months later, JUST to make sure. Nope. Still not scary. To me, anyway.
It's a simple idea, and would seem to have the potential to be scary: 3 young student filmmakers went to Burkettsville, Maryland, formerly (This is not fact, but fiction invented by the makers of "Blair Witch", though Burkettsville itself is real)called Blair, to make a documentary on the Blair Witch, a settler in colonial times by the name of Elly Kedward who supposedly practiced witchcraft. After being exiled from the Blair settlement to die in the woods, she apparently caused a plague to wipe out most of the children in Blair. Hundreds of years later, she is believed by some to still be roaming the woods, causing mayhem and horror aplenty, including inducing a crazy hermit who lived in the woods in the 1940's to kidnap some children and kill them in his basement. They interviewed various locals, then set off into the woods. They became lost. They were victimized at night by strange sounds and someone or something that made little piles of stones outside their tent. One of them disappeared. The remaining two were victimized some more, then they went to the crazy old hermit's abandoned house, dropped their cameras and disappeared themselves. Their footage was found several years later, pasted together and this is what we are watching. This is all well and good. It even has creepy potential. Obviously, something about it was frightening to a lot of people, so what I am about to say is my own opinion, and should not stop anyone from checking out this movie if they are interested. I thought the whole thing played flatly. I found the three non-actors playing the students irritating. They bicker, scream and swear throughout, with no variation on the theme. Despite the implications of the little piles of rocks found outside the tent each morning or the stick figures found hanging from trees, I did not, personally, find these things threatening. If these three jerks were that hot to find out who was putting them there, why not turn off the lights in the tent and stay awake, watching? The noises heard at night in the woods were nebulous, at best. Anyone who has ever gone camping will tell you that the night woods are full of all sorts of strange sounds: breaking sticks, limbs falling, things moving around, even cries that sometimes sound human. I won't complain, as some have, about the jerkiness of the camerawork, because to be fair this is supposed to be raw footage shot by people who were walking through the woods and just filming each other. What I will comment on, though, is the stupidity of the notion that, in the extremity of their terror, "...alone, lost, hunted..." as the girl in the funny knit cap so famously intones, her nose running into the camera, even kids as moronic as these would keep filming. Were this as authentic an experience as the makers of this borefest would like us to think it is, these dorks would have dropped the cameras and just started running until they either found their way out of the woods or just keeled over! I will say that the last ten minutes or so of the movie, when the two remaining wonks find the murderous hermit's old house and go inside has a certain amount of tension in it, though considered after the fact, the tension is caused almost entirely by what could potentially happen, rather than by anything that does. That, to me, is the big problem with the whole movie. It represents an hour and a half, give or take, of missed opportunities. And just out of curiosity-since this film represents three dimbulbs shooting footage of their every waking moment while lost in the woods over a three day period, why is only one of them seen going to the bathroom, and then only once? Wouldn't schmucks like these show their limited wit by taking every opportunity to sneak up on one another with the camera during private moments? Would have made the film more interesting, at least for me.
