Not a bad job considering the budget

Rating: 2/10 (25 November 2006)

Spoilers First off, I applaud them for making lots of money with no real investment. A hoax like this can only be done once. There were a couple of nice touches in the movie, like them trying to follow a stream and winding up in the same spot. That's freaky. Also, good acting. But the effects were extremely cheesy, like the four guys beating the sides of tent. Was I really supposed to think it was anything else? Maybe it's because this movie never really "took me there". At least with the Ninth Gate, I could suspend disbelief long enough to accept the idea that the three books really are evil and the hero's life might have been in danger a few times, but not here. Also you never actually see the Blair Witch. It's kind of like making a song about a Teenage Wasteland and calling it Baba O'Reilly. Where is Baba O'Reilly? You might say the Witch is invisible to explain her pronounced absence. Ah, but then how did they have an old drawing of the Witch in that book? Hmn? Also the editing was impossible. If you're recording the same thing with two separate cameras, you will get the same action twice from two separate perspectives, not a smoothly-edited single thread of continuity. I especially chuckled when the one guy was talking into one camera and his voice carried over flawlessly into the footage of the other camera, all supposedly unedited. That was really obvious. By editing it professionally, it lost any credibility it might have had in my mind. And why did they go in that house anyway? How stupid was that? To make matters worse, they made a companion video for this movie (before Blair Witch 2) that you could rent, supposedly of "newly-discovered" video. At least they threw it in free when I rented Blair Witch. It was the one guy and the girl sitting in the tent saying things like, "Wow, that was a lot of weird stuff that happened today, huh?" "Did you ever figure out what those twig figures were?" "No. I never saw nuthin' like that. Crazy, huh?" This companion movie was obviously shot with a different camera than either of the ones used in making Blair Witch, making it an even more obvious fake, and it was twice as boring.
While we're at it, didn't they film the inside of the Witch's house? If real, the cameras should still be in there. Who discovered the film without getting killed by the Witch? There was absolutely no way for me to get into the illusion of this movie with so many flaws continually shouting at me that it was a hoax. They might as well have put that kid from The Last Action Hero in here saying over and over, "It's just a movie. It's not real." It astounds me to think that some people actually thought it was a true documentary. On the scary scale, 1 to 10, I give this a 2, only for the few freaky (but not really scary) scenes. This was tied with Batman as most over-hyped movie of the 90's.