Emperor's new broomstick

Rating: Null/10 (20 July 1999)

If a beginning film class at a community college were given the task of adapting a Stephen King short story on video, the results would probably look much like this bewilderingly untalented feature, which is on its way to being the most popular independent film of all time. The two novice directors claim not to have seen Ruggero Deodato's extremely similar (and infinitely superior) CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, though the debt RESERVOIR DOGS pays to Ringo Lam's CITY ON FIRE is chump change in comparison. A snooty-toot documentary filmmaker schleps two guys into the woods of Maryland to record evidence of a fabled serial-killing witch. The two guys fill up the first thirty minutes of the movie with fart-sniffing jokes; then, when you're waiting for something terrifying to be unearthed, the crew is menaced with--a bundle of twigs? A pile of stones? A tooth? The B horror movies of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur were low on horror and high on atmospherics. Here, in the absence of palpable shocks, you get--twigs. The oafish storytelling, the "documentary" surface that wouldn't fool a child in short pants, acting that evokes the adult-entertainment industry--somehow this all spun the buzz machine and turned BLAIR WITCH into the flavor of the nanosecond. Depressingly, a friend called tonight from Houston, Texas, to report that lines curled around two city blocks. This hunk of unutterable junk feels like taps for the independent film movement: the message seems to be, You can be a klutz with a video camera, just as long as you're high-concept. (The directors' advice in an interview to aspiring filmmakers: "Find a marketable niche.")