Is This Some Sort of Bad Joke?

Rating: 2/10 (27 May 2005)

Is this some sort of bad joke? The film starts with the statement: "In October of 1994, three student film makers disappeared in the woods near Burkittesville, Maryland. One year later, their footage was found." Everything that follows is supposed to be the footage shot by the vanished students before they disappeared while making a documentary about a local witchcraft legend. I understand that , although the film is a work of fiction, it was originally marketed as a true story. A similar marketing technique was used to sell the film "Fargo", but the dubious ethics of the procedure do not affect the quality of that film, which was excellent. "The Blair Witch Project" is anything but.
The film has a sort of faux-naif quality about it. It was shot on hand-held cameras in a deliberate attempt to mimic an amateur style of film-making, although the results are so poor that they would shame even the average home movie, let alone a project made by a group of student film makers, who would presumably have received some sort of training in basic film technique. Only a few minutes of the supposed "footage", in fact, consists of material which might conceivably have formed part of the projected documentary. Most of the rest consists of scenes of the three students wandering about after getting lost in the forest, endlessly quarrelling with and screaming at each other in a torrent of foul language. Why the supposed students would have wasted their film on these scenes is not explained. It appears, from a series of unexplained occurrences, that someone, or something, is pursuing the students, although it is never clear exactly who or what is involved. No explanation for their disappearance is ever given.
The film has sometimes been praised for reinventing the horror genre for the late nineties, but this strikes me as an impossible ambition. The genre seems to have become stuck in a cul-de-sac, able to inspire little beyond cynically self-mocking parodies along the lines of the "Scream" and "Scary Movies" series. "The Blair Witch Project" never succeeds in breaking out of this cul-de-sac for the reason that its approach is a quite uninteresting one; lengthy, badly-shot scenes of people running through the woods and shouting at one another do not make for entertaining viewing. I was never able to feel either sympathy for such an unsympathetic bunch or terror on their behalf. There was only one frightening thing about the film: that such a badly-made, badly-acted, over-hyped film could manage to generate such media attention and to achieve such success at the box office. 2/10