The Web site is more entertaining than the movie

Rating: 1/10 (7 August 1999)

After weeks of reading the hype about this independent film that supposedly impressed audiences at the Sundance Film Festival, I finally found time to see it in Colma, California a town in which the dead "residents" outnumber the living. After seeing this movie, I envied those dead people buried in the nearby cemeteries. They did not have to sit through 87 minutes of shaky handheld footage.
Rather than a ghost story, the Blair Witch Project is largely a pseudo-documentary about three often-obnoxious Gen-Xers lost in the woods. We grasp their plight early in the film, so it's difficult to endure their bickering and histrionics after that point is made. By the time we arrive at the film's climax, most of us are glad to know that these tiresome filmmakers will be bound, tortured and disemboweled.
The Blair Witch Project Web site actually contains more information than we see presented in the film. Web surfers are allowed to read the "back-story" of the Blair witch and her lingering hold on the Burkitsville community. I was hoping to see some standard "talking head" footage of the law enforcement officers and the private investigator who eventually located the personal effects of the missing filmmakers. I also expected interviews with the trio's grieving friends and relatives. While I normally dislike such cinematic cliches, in this instance, it would have been a relief.
This film could easily be edited down to about twenty minutes of footage that could be presented as film clips within another documentary film about the filmmakers' disappearance (the film I expected to see).