Very disturbing, frightening at points, worth $10 in all

Rating: Null/10 (21 July 1999)

I am not entirely sure if this film justifies the absurdly long lines wrapping around the Angelika, which from the look of the crowd, seemed to owe more to the legions of young film students paying tribute to the latest underground, shoestring indie smash than to the actual quality of this pseudo-documentary. That being said, the filmmakers did right to max out their credit cards and beg their relatives for the $25K this supposedly cost (though that will be cranked through the indie myth machine until the buzz has our producers selling internal organs to pay for dubbing) since "The Blair Witch Project" is well above the mass of horror films served up from Hollywood. And isn't that the point of an independent cinema, after all? Alternately frightening and amusing, this film will scare you if you let it run away with your imagination all the way into the final, terrifying sequence. If not, it feels like another campfire story told by the creepy Boy Scout father who probably scared you much more in the telling than with the tall tale itself.