Boring as hell

Rating: 1/10 (6 August 1999)

It's a sad commentary on the state of film that people are willing to christen anything that is offbeat or different as the great white hope of the film industry. This movie has made gobs and gobs of money, has probably made the people involved richer than they could possibly have imagined, but this is not the great movie that people want to believe it is. It is extremely boring and depressingly unscary. There is absolutely no excuse, in my mind, for the mind-bogglingly crappy way the film was shot...things are out of focus, it is jumpy, and much of the time the film is either completely dark or the shot is of trees or rocks while action is happening elsewhere. I realize it is supposed to be a documentary shot by amateurs, but there is no reason to put the audience through that for some arty notion of what is "realistic filmmaking". A 60,000 dollar budget doesn't mean you end up with "Clerks". Usually you end up with a crappy-looking film, which is exactly what the money bought here.