A triumph of marketing genius over substance or style

Rating: 3/10 (9 May 2010)

More than 10 years after its premiere and many who watch this film may well wonder what in the world the hubbub was about. The truth is that the marketing campaign for the film is a far more interesting topic than anything that appears in the film itself (more on that later). A relatively simple tale of three amateur documentary filmmakers who vanish into the Maryland woods while investigating the title phenomena is the center of this film. The amateur nature of the film-making in that everything we see is fairly badly shot through a jittery hand-held camcorder is supposed to add authenticity and accentuate the "you are there" atmosphere of the unknown a la Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Unfortunately, a glaring discrepancy is that Romero's film actually had a solid premise to hang its low-budget authenticity on and the Blair Witch Project has nothing of the kind. The opening moments which introduce us to three characters, played by Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams, are dreadfully uninteresting and fail to do much to ingratiate the leads, other than to emphasize that Donahue is a type-A control freak who micromanages the entire foray into the woods badly. If anyone can figure out what the "legend" is that is supposed to be so fascinating to inspire a documentary and propel this story forward, they are doing better than I. The mishmash of background provided by snippets of interviews with locals indicate that the legend may or may not have something to do with a witch, a ghost and/or an old male psycho who kidnaps people - the entire explanation is murky at best, which is a fatal flaw since we have no idea what exactly these people are searching for. While there would be some suspense to be mined from easily losing one's way in the wilderness, that quickly dissipates thanks to the ill-tempered characters basically shouting and cursing at other with dialog that is rather painfully made up on the fly. The supernatural elements are total misfires due to two issues: 1) for much of the time, when the characters claim to hear something ominous in the nighttime forest, the audio is so bad that we often cannot hear the same things, and 2) the reactions to the most minor of events are so hysterical as to induce unintentional laughter (ie., someone sees a pile of sticks in the forest, which results in screaming and running). Of the actors, Leonard makes little impact in his limited screen time, Donahue is shrill and annoying, and Williams hints that he might have been able to do something worthwhile within a better structured film. By the end, few if anyone will know what, why, where, how or who The Blair Witch is. It is truly a shame that some of the savvy poured into the marketing did not wend its way into the film. Over-hyped as the little film that came out of no where, such a claim was near laughable since the internet had been abuzz for months before its release laying the ground work for the film and deliberately confusing easily credulous viewers that it was true and what they were seeing was actually a video found abandoned in the woods rather than actors playing a badly written plot. Coupled with a front page Time Magazine article, ready-to-be-duped patrons flocked in droves to see the true story of the poor young victims obliterated by the supernatural, only to subsequently be disappointed in that they were conned and the production they were conned into seeing was a badly filmed, motion sickness inducing, amateurishly acted mess. Don't believe me? Seriously, try to find anyone in the physical world (not in the anonymity of the internet) who will actually admit to having been terrified or even marginally entertained by this film. It takes a really long search. And in the age of similarly filmed efforts like Cloverfield or Paranormal Activity, Blair Witch's fading star gets less notable with each passing year.