hype never had it so good

Rating: Null/10 (30 July 2000)

The effect was weak, at best. I saw it while the hype was still a buzz, during its first week of release at the arthouses and well before it shot into Multiplex City.
It's been compared to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which, in spite of the schlocky production, is genuinely a much scarier and more disturbing film. Where we had an overweight man wearing a grotesquely hewn leather mask, placing screaming girls on meathooks and sawing through brush after his last survivor, Horror Redefined now has us shaking in our boots from bundles of sticks and circles of stones. I suppose that means that in the new world of what is scary, a circle of visciously screaming bumpkins trying to force the corpse of their dead patriarch to drop a hammer on a bound and defenseless girl's head is no match for casual-drug teens spewing language that would make Lenny Bruce blush.
Unfortunately, the 'innovation' of horror and fright coming from the unseen had been developed long since-- and, as in Maupassant's stories of anguish (1887-90), expressed more eloquently.
The cinematography gives rise to either motion sickness or boredom, and the production is so vapid as to be beyond belief. It is certainly a promising student film effort, but hardly one that deserved such attention.
In sum, the most frightening thing about The Blair Witch Project is that a considerable portion of the film cognoscenti seemed utterly convinced that it was a groundbreaking cinematic achievement.