Zzzzzzzzz...

Rating: 1/10 (26 July 2001)

Okay. So we've got these three film-school kids -- Heather Donahue as Heather, Josh Leonard as Josh, and Mike Williams as ... um ... oh yeah, Mike. They go off into the woods to film a documentary about the Blair Witch (and if you haven't spent hours browsing the BWP website, you have absolutely no idea who the Blair Witch is or why anybody would be interested in her). Instead, they get lost. They wander around. They wander around some more. They scream, yell, and curse at each other. They act like idiots.
And, of course, they KEEP FILMING through all this, as I'm sure any three smart people would, because we all know that filming yourself getting lost is far more important than getting back to civilization.
Eventually some weird stuff happens. We don't know exactly what because nobody bothers to tell us. Is it scary? Well, I was kind of afraid that the herky-jerky camera motion would make me vomit in the theater, but other than that the film that TV promos called the "scariest movie since The Exorcist" didn't have one scary moment.
I've heard it said that the filmmakers wanted to scare us by purposely not showing us everything. Fine, but even if you don't show everything, you still have to show enough. Take the movie "Seven". You don't see the actual murders committed by John Doe, but by showing you the bodies and murder scenes, the director forces you to imagine their brutality. "Blair Witch" doesn't give you any clue what's going on. The only thing I was led to imagine during this movie was how else I could have spent 80 minutes.