This will psychologically kill you.

Rating: 9/10 (20 July 2000)

Whow. Most horror movies don't scare me, mostly because you just get scared for one moment (like when someone's walking into a dark hallway and the killer jumps in front of him), and because those movies are very often just one big cliché. But this really scared the s**t out of me. This is not jumping in front of someone and stabbing him, this is psychologically killing someone. Here's how you do that: First, scare the victims with some weird voodoo stuff they'd rather don't want to have anything to do with. Then torture them by taking away something they really need, their sleep for example, scare them so hard they live the whole day in fear of the night. And ultimately, literally scare them to death by letting them now there's no escape. They'll surely gonna go totally insane, and maybe they might kill themselves. If they don't you'll do it.`
Finally an original concept in a movie, I haven't seen that for a long time. It's too bad that the geniuses who came up with this idea didn't get a bigger budget... Actually, it isn't, because being suck a low budget movie adds to the realism of this movie (it's supposed to be found footage so it's gotta be crappy). There's no other way of making this movie. It's great, and I think it's too bad that some people can't see that. They'll probably walk into the theater or the video store think they're gonna be amused (that's what most people think after 3 Screams, 2 Last Summers and dozens of other copies). But this is the type of movie that is made to crawl under your skin and eat you slowly from the inside out.
Another thing that those people probably didn't like is that you don't know half the story. EVERY Hollywood movie has a complete story with a beginning, an ending and stuff happening in the middle, and the viewer sees everything. This movie is in fact not a movie, as the makers try to tell you that it's just a bunch of found footage put together. And of course the camera's not always running, so there's no continuous story. Which leaves you with some big holes to fill after the movie. One solution is the website that caused the hype when the movie was in theaters and which made me go hire the movie. But it doesn't answer all of your questions, in fact it just adds to the mystery of the whole thing.
Acting. That would be nice in this movie, some people who could put down a credible personage (not someone famous, that would be real stupid, someone who is unknown and took acting classes). I think Heather is about the only one who really made me think that this was real (and that is what the movie is about, right?). Josh and Mikey overact most of the time. I noticed that if you watch the actors closely the movie seems less scary, probably because you see that they're just acting.
The atmosphere created by the people who made this (actors, editors, directors, marketing guys and webmasters) is great, it crawls under your skin and makes the movie scare the hell out of you. That atmosphere is what made this 100,000 $ movie a million dollar blockbuster. Since there was no directing at all (the directors just sent the actors in the woods with their equipment and the script), s****y acting in some scenes, some dumb things in the story (map, runaway) and an empty feeling at the end, I rate this movie a 9/10