I wish I could cast a negative vote

Rating: 1/10 (21 January 2001)

According to the comment guidelines, a post has to be at least four lines long, and can't be single word reviews. I doubt that copying and pasting the words "bad" and "awful" over and over again would be allowed.
I guess I went into this with too high of an expectation. Three friends and I tired to see this movie on the third day of the opening weekend, but it was sold out. So a week later, two of those same friends and I tired again. This time we made it in...with only about six other people. I know now why there were so few people in the theater that time. No one was going to see it a second time, and anyone who had seen it before their friends must have done the same thing I did after seeing it...if a friend told me they were going to see it, I did everything possible (short of bludgeoning them with the nearest piece of furniture) to prevent them from seeing it.
The home video touch was interesting, and had potential, but it just didn't come off. The only thing it did for me, was give me the kind of headache and eye strain I get after reading several hundred pages of an engineering textbook or writing a C++ program. I did not find this movie the least bit scary. I can think of several other movies that scared or disturbed me much more than this one. Actually, I spent more time to stiffle my laughter than anything else.
I know what some of you are thinking, "The movie is trying to portray the emotion they are going through being lost out there. Try putting yourself in their shoes." Well, I think I can imagine that desperate feeling they were supposed to be experiencing. One time while backpacking in the mountains of New Mexico I ended up away from the campsite with several others after dark without any kind of light (it was overcast that night, and somehow six of us forgot to bring along a single flashlight). It took us an hour to slowly walk only a few hundred yards with everyone holding on to the shoulders of the person in front of them, and the person in front feeling for trees along the side of the trail. And I don't know how many times I have lay awake in my tent by myself or with one other person trying to figure out if the noises I hear are just the wind, or something looking for a meal, and how big is that something?
To this date, I shudder whenever this movie is mentioned. Not because it scared or disturbed me. I shudder out of disgust that I wasted so much time on this movie. I can't believe this actually made it to the big screen. The film should have been burned before it was ever reproduced.