Not your average horror film

Rating: Null/10 (21 June 2000)

A film which fell foul of its own publicity machine, `The Blair Witch Project' was abhorred and derided by the mainstream film-going public which it became unfortunately directed at due to its extraordinary and outlandish marketing campaign. `The Blair Witch Project' is not a typical film that the typical cinema-going public would normally be exposed to. The camera-work is jerky, the dialogue repetitive and inane and the action virtually non-existent. At times confusing, annoying, irritating and tedious, this film is nonetheless a brilliant piece of arthouse experimental film-making. This movie is virtually all style-there's hardly any plot, no real action, no semblance of a real script-and one that works on a deeper psychological level than the standard mainstream horror film. Indeed, only the very last image in the film is truly frightening, and only if it can be correlated to an incident at the very beginning. The rest of it only becomes scary afterwards, when the audience has had time to consider what they've seen. It is groundbreaking, manipulative cinema made without a script, with an amateur cast and with little or no post-production values. This is a remarkable film which can only really be appreciated, if the accompanying hype is overlooked, as a unique, avant-garde art film and not the regular Hollywood stock it was presented as to the public.