Dull incompetence wrapped up in false advertising

Rating: 1/10 (19 May 2000)

It's either a documentary or a work of fiction. If it's a documentary it's a fraudulent one. (It's not even a clever fraud. I wouldn't have thought that such grotesquely inept camera-jiggling could have fooled anyone; but apparently it did.) If it's a documentary then it's none of MY business to condemn it - I should simply report the scam to the police, the broadcasting tribunal, etc. and hope that someone will have the nerve to prosecute.
Taken as a work of fiction `The Blair Witch Project' is possibly the most wretched that has ever come to my attention. I'm serious. I can think of works of fiction that are worse in some positive way - books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance - and I can't be expected to keep every single forgettable old book or television show lodged in my memory - still, I know of no other work so thoroughly lacklustre. We don't even get the bare minimum of competent camera work we demand as a matter of course in other lame, incompetent endeavours. The camera wobbles stupidly and does NOTHING else. It doesn't even give us information. The characters TELL us everything that's going on, in their long-winded way; they then offer us the camera footage as a kind of proof that they're not lying. What's true of the images is true of the sound, too. Heather and crew hear some `scary' noises at night; but do WE get a chance to listen to them properly, to decide for ourselves if they're scary or not? Nope: instead we get an earfull of everyone panicking and DESCRIBING the sounds that I'm surprised they can still hear over the gabble of their own voices.
How could something so bad as `The Blair Witch Project' turn a profit? How could it show, not just a profit, but the greatest return on investment of any film in history; how could it, despite all the people who walked out of the cinema or wished that they had, produce a few testimonials from people who said that they were duly scared - even that they LIKED it? I think I have an answer. The film disguised itself as a documentary. The dullest footage of the most banal murder has its attractions, provided it's genuine. Fictional murders have to work, so to speak, to be interesting: real murders automatically are. A simple lie can transform eighty minutes of utter rubbish into box office gold.
But you wouldn't want to tell an open lie too blatantly or too consistently. The law still has SOME teeth. A better tactic is to persuade people to pretend - not imagine, but PRETEND - that they're watching a documentary. If we can't really believe that this is a documentary, they'd like us to come as close to really believing as possible. Fiction is all about `suspending disbelief', right?
Well, no, it isn't. A good work of fiction can frighten us, thrill us, fill us with aching longing and/or keen interest, etc. without asking us to be so feeble-witted as to suspend disbelief. `The Blair Witch Project' can't.
P.S.: Some say we should be merciful because the film only cost $30 000 to make. But what does this have to do with us? It's not as if they reduced admission prices in consequence.