A project which was bound to disappoint

Rating: Null/10 (23 July 2002)

A movie that only works if you think it's real - rather difficult when it's been hyped beyond all reason for six months before it opens!
I didn't so much watch the film as study it - the clever use of the handheld cameras, the disorientation of the viewer, the improvised script. I wondered how much of the participants' reactions were real and how much were acted. I wondered if the directors were really hiding in the trees and disturbing the actors in the middle of the night.
And that's the problem - the concept of the whole project got in the way. The sensationalist mass media world we live in today, where information is available at the fingertips 24 hours a day, cannot sustain the 'believablity' required to make this a great scary movie. Orson Welles' War of the Worlds could not happen today.
A huge disappointment, and certainly not the scariest movie ever.