"MTV" Horror...

Rating: 3/10 (13 November 1999)

...and that's not a compliment. "The Blair Witch Project" is right behind "The Phantom Menace" as the year's most overrated movie.
It's hard to say what this movie's BIGGEST problem is, but we can start with the characters, a trio of whiny, self-absorbed idiots that will absolutely annoy the crap out of you. Watching these clowns from a first-person perspective is like watching a feature-length "Real World" episode (which is a terrifying proposition in itself). I, for one, was rooting for the witch, and it's hard to take the movie seriously when you WANT the ostensible heroes to die.
Believability is also a huge problem, for one very simple reason: Nobody in their right mind would have continued filming as long as these people did. They just wouldn't, ESPECIALLY while running through the woods at NIGHT while in a state of complete panic. Now, this may sound like nitpicking, but in order for "Blair Witch" to work we've got to BELIEVE that we're watching actual footage, taken in a situation and a state of mind as horrific as the students were in. It is simply beyond belief that they would have the presence of mind to continue filming as their situation becomes a fight for survival.
And overall the movie was - dare I say? - boring. Just plain dull. I wasn't drawn into the situation; I wasn't even remotely scared until the last five minutes (after which the movie just stops - it doesn't end, it just STOPS), mainly because I was so tired of listening to the annoying main characters bicker. This is a tiresome movie.
Now, I know this is supposed the be the "scariest movie of all time"; I know I probably missed the point, that these people were SUPPOSED to be annoying (in order to appear more "real"); that the production values were supposed to be incredibly cheap ("reality" again), and that the horror was supposed to be entirely SUGGESTED without us actually seeing anything scary, along with various other "artistic" reasons that filmmakers like this feed us when they don't really feel like actually making a horror movie. All I know is, "Blair Witch" is a waste of time. Go watch a movie that somebody actually put some effort into.