Stone Soup

Rating: 5/10 (11 August 1999)

The Blair Witch Project deserves an A as film class final project. The concept is good. The throwback to the pre-special effects days where the imagination was loosed to create horror/fear is fine. As entertainment a C is much closer. The "forest" has been great in myth and literature as a frightening place where trees blot out the sun and poor lost waifs wander. So how do we get stuck with this scrubby excuse of a forest? I've been lost in far scary forests and this one would have been a joke. Then we have the acting... There isn't much worse than reaching the end of a movie and the only remaining character is someone you hope dies quickly and painfully. Fortunately, from the beginning we knew all the characters had disappeared and were undoubtedly dead so we had little to stress over. It is just amazing how many people have seen this "ink blot" of a movie and managed to project their own imagined story lines, fears, stellar performances etc into it. I haven't been a fan of all white or all black paintings that profess to have some deep insights into life. It is commendable that with not much more than that the directors were able to catch an audience willing to fill in not only the details but all of the main ingredients. Any one remember Stone Soup?