Badly made, badly acted and about as scary as a boy scout camping trip.

Rating: 1/10 (20 October 2009)

It's not often I say this, but i hate this film. It's a boring, badly written, badly made piece of crap posing as an arty verite style film, and has it's status purely due to hype and clever marketing gimmickry. Most of the action is plot less, just some morons bumbling round some woods. I mean, I used to go camping in woods with my dad all the time, it's not an especially scary environment for me. Plus: it's some damn woods, not the Amazon jungle. There's bound to be other people there and it's not exactly going to be hard to find your way out. It's just not believable. And most of the film is just them lost in some woods, it's not exciting, it's just something that happens thats inconvenient. It's like making a horror film about missing a bus, or something.
Unlike films such as Deliverance or Eden Lake, I never actually felt the protagonists were in any actual danger. Sure the odd creepy thing happens, but apart from the end (which I admit was great) scary stuff is few and far between and as for the documentary aspect, surely the point of a documentary is you shoot the interesting/relevant stuff. Their rationale for continuing to film was nowhere near as persuasive as the one in REC.
I guess the main reason I didn't like the film was that I really didn't care about any of the characters. Heather just spent all her time whining/crying, whereas the two guys had almost no personality at all. I really wasn't bothered what happened to them. And there just wasn't enough to hold my interest, the ideas ran out as soon as they entered the woods. Not enough happened to sustain my interest and given the film was only 80 minutes long, thats really saying something. It felt to me like a film school short that had been expanded to me, rather than a fully rounded film.
A good comparison is The Evil Dead where the direction and camera work served to create tension. In Blair Witch is looks in parts like they just ran aimlessly round some woods with a camera, while in Raimi's film the camera also prowls around and snakes along the ground, but it serves a purpose in doing so, offering a perspective of the entity that haunts the woods. In Blair Witch, the trouble isn't subtlety, it's that we don't see ANYTHING remotely frightening, not even glimpsed.
It isn't like Rosemary's Baby where the questions of what is supernatural and what is just coincidence/imagination pervade throughout the film but are finally resolved, there is a frustrating lack of closure. Sure, you could say it's just being left open to interpretation, but there are so few clues/pieces of information in the film with which the audience can gain any understanding, I just see it as sloppy writing. It started brilliantly, the interviews with the townspeople seemingly foreshadowing a much better film which ultimately never materialises, but doesn't build on that. I don't want to see a lot of hokey special effects of anything, but I did expect to see more horrific things happening than just three irritating people walking round a wood for what felt like forever.
I don't expect people to go watch clichéd slashers and remakes. I hate those movies too. But there are a great many better horror films out there than this one and it mystifies me why this one was singled out for so much acclaim. OK, so the 90s being a rubbish overall decade for horror probably helped Blair Witch and the verite style is cool to begin with, but the whole thing is underplotted and thinks it's much smarter than it is. It substitutes incoherence for a plot and screaming/bickering for intelligent dialogue and effective character development. This film is sort of like the emperor with no clothes. Everyone is told of it's brilliance, and people follow suit without really stepping back and looking how it works as a film, as a narrative work or a genre piece. The truth is, it doesn't work well as either.