A F*** In A Sleeping Bag

Rating: Null/10 (27 October 1999)

Do you believe there's such a thing as positive fate, a force generous enough to place you at a crossroads of time and place offering rewards far beyond anything your actual actions might have earned? If you don't, then maybe the directors of 'Blair Witch Project' really are geniuses, geniuses at hustling the public mood anyway.
One goes into 'B/W/P' with not only the official publicity but the comments of many for whose views one has respect encouraging one to expect the scariest round-the-campfire story of all time. Instead... well, there's a joke in the film's early stages about someone farting in a tent. As the terrors of the night go, this film is strictly on the level of the latter horror.
And in fact it's the tactic which at first hearing does sound like a stroke of genius - presenting the story like the raw footage of an unfinished documentary - that proves the biggest liability. Initially, it works well in disguising the fact that the 'plot' is the most perfunctory assemblage of horror cliches (we even get the old "you kids never learn" line off of one of the local rednecks: is that copyright 'Friday the 13th.' or 'Scooby Doo'?), but before long it becomes clear that the narrow strictures of this format mean the horror can't extend beyond shaky shots of the characters running backward and forward in reaction to the lamest little bits of trick-or-treat: baby cries, twig figures outside the tent, those two nuisance directors shaking the tent. The dramatic and narrative development one grows impatient for would jar with the open-ended confusion of the mockumentary format. (And it's impossible to believe that Heather - who's shooting most of this footage - could be a directing student: wouldn't she, at least in the earlier stages, have some instinct for, some pride in, producing a coherent image? The most fun post-film game might be to imagine the visual mess a Heather who survived these adventures would make of your favourite movie, be it 'Jurassic Park' or 'Brief Encounter'.)
If a little tension does develop in the last five minutes, it's largely because one thinks: "this is the 'scariest movie ever'. Something scary's got to happen now, surely." One greets that ruined house like a shipwreck survivor sighting land. The supposedly awesome final image feels like a very short-breathed 'Boo!' at the end of a very long shaggy dog story. Its power for others is only of sociological interest in terms of what it says about the deepest fears of the twenty-something target audience. Even the congratulations the film has received for an unironic revival of the supernatural horror flick is dubious: the film lacks faith in the witch idea and comes up with a second monster more tied in to the secular dreads of modern tabloid culture (Yup: it's child molesting again: the red under the bed, the Nazi fifth columnist, of the 90's.) Interestingly, this may well be the least political American horror film of the last fifty years: the fact that witches haunt the actual political past of America is never alluded to.
And even for those who have found the movie scary, it's hard to believe it could have the extended life of a true horror classic. Effective or not, the horror is so basic that there simply aren't the deeper layers for subsequent viewings to uncover of, say, 'Psycho' or 'The Innocents' or 'The Shining.' This picture, complete with its airhead protagonists and their "this is definitely not cool, man,"-type dialogue is closer to 'Friday the 13th. Part 12": only without the same dramatic complexity.
So why the success? The most positive spin might be that this is one more triumph for postmodern democracy. The audience knows this isn't the work of some snooty-nosed genius: a Hitchcock, a Polanski, a Poe; no, many must be thinking "Gee, if only i'd gone out into the woods with my videocam last Hallowe'en, I could have been the hottest thing in Hollywood, too!" But please, guys, don't take that as a suggestion for next Hallowe'en: unless you are another Poe.