Good as a one off experience - but no need to repeat it

Rating: 6/10 (7 January 2002)

"The Blair Witch Project" seems to have got itself a love/hate relationship with many people. I'm a bit divided. The premise of the movie is simple enough: Three students go into the woods to make a documentary about the Blair Witch and end up wishing they hadn't.
"The Blair Witch Project" takes the approach that what's scariest is what our imaginations can conjure up (though this is of course a result of it's budget of about $20,000). We never see anything as such - a pile of stones doesn't exactly inspire fear but how they got there is (what's meant to) create the terror. The hounded feel is compounded by the use of the hand held camera to bring us into what Heather & co. are seeing - we never know any more than they do. We're with them until the end.
Does any of it work? To an extent. As a one-off-no-lights-on experience it can be eerie for the reasons I've described. The use of unknown actors - who were themselves "scared" during filming to add authenticity - helps add to the "reality" of this being lost footage. On a second viewing the flaws become apparent - there's no plot for example. That's fine for a one-time viewing but a movie should stand up to repeated viewing. The direction is obviously not really there - they just fling the camera about as they're running around and the "actors" are not camera people.

It's hard to judge "The Blair Witch Project". Certainly it's different. Different enough to be good is had to say. I'd recommend watching it to judge for yourself but I'd be surprised if many people get much out of watching it for a second time as it'd ruin the taste taken from the first. Overall I'd give it a 6.5/10 (rounded favorably to 7/10 on IMDB's voting poll because I'm a nice guy)