Nice Camera Work, Shame about the rest

Rating: Null/10 (13 November 1999)

The Blair Witch promised so much, and in my opinion delivered very little. I tried to go into the cinema with an open mind, not pre-judging the film. I did however expect a eerie, unnerving film that would make me leave the cinema feeling slightly uneasy. This was simply due to the massive success it had received in the states. However it did not deliver any of the above aspects in my opinion.
I felt that the use of hand held cameras did increase the sense of realism, and the acting from the cast is 100% perfect, there is nothing I can fault with them, they really gave across the feeling that they were completely in despair, not knowing where to go and what to do,this however could not cover up the problems with the film.
There will be many people who will watch the film and enjoy it emensly, I suppose I have a tendency to analyze a film to much, maybe it stems from my vast movie watching experience.
I just felt that it fell into to many of the classic horror movie cleches, which I would have though the writers would have tried to stay well away from, others may not notice them. I think my main problem was due to the fact that because they only have hand held camera, due to the fact that the film is supposed to have been made up from the recovered film reels, everything that you see has to be filmed by the actual film makers. This however raises problems, an example could be when one of the team is filming a disturbing scene and is screaming hysterically but still continues to film and also at one point actually zooms in on the subject. Is this really what a person would do, I imagine most people would turn and get the hell out as fast as humanly possible. I understand there is little you can do with scenes like this as there is no 3rd party filming, but they should have thought the scenes through better. You could have written it as thought they made a another film at the same time, the second being the film of themselves doing the documentary, this would have allowed scenes to be included which could have dealt with the previous scene.
My only advice is to watch the film with an open mind, and try not to analyze to much, and you should be able to enjoy it as simply a medium thriller, if you are expecting the scariest movie since the exorcist then you are in for a big shock.