The ShakyCam Project

Rating: Null/10 (11 July 2003)

I'll tell you what I find sad: when something gets hyped to the point where there's just no way that it can ever live up to people's expectations. I remember reading a quote somewhere saying that this movie was scarier than the Exorcist. If I hadn't already seen the movie at that point, I would've been pretty disappointed had I gone to see it with this quote in mind. I personally believe that I will not see a film scarier than the Exorcist during my lifetime. At the time of this writing, I am twenty-eight years old. The Exorcist is the scariest movie of all time in my opinion and this film, chilling as it can be at points, comes nowhere near first place. I feel the need to express this because so many people that I know have watched this thinking they were about to get the very life scared out of them, only to walk away shaking their heads in disgust. I happen to think that while it's not the greatest horror movie in the world, nor is it a great movie, period, as a whole I have to give it a good write-up because let's face it, the filmmakers took a good idea and ran with it. The way that this film was done and marketed is the kind of thing that makes one ask themselves, "Now, why didn't I come up with that idea?". You're probably familiar with the story behind it already but if you're not, here it is: three young filmmakers head out to the woods as part of their research project on an old legend revolving around the Blair Witch and mysteriously disappear. The movie you watch is supposed to be the actual footage they filmed while stuck in the forest, found a year later. It's shot entirely with a camcorder and a black and white 16mm camera held by any of the three main characters. Those who get motion sickness easily may want to avoid this entirely because there are scenes in the film where the shots go all over the place in that sickening way that camcorders tend to produce more than regular film does. The whole idea is to give it a pseudo-documentary feel and I think it works well for the most part. There was this whole marketing craze where they didn't tell anyone that the whole thing was a fake and they actually pulled it off to some extent, even going so far as to have a website dedicated to the mystery of the Blair Witch and the strange revelations that emerged from the search team's findings. When I saw this in the theaters, a girl outside was crying about how sad it was that they never found the three kids. She bought the whole thing obviously. I read up on movies a lot so I didn't fall for it because I knew about the whole myth thing beforehand. At any rate, I found the movie to be generally unsettling. The acting is acceptable but seems forced on occasion. It's my understanding that they were given a rough approximation of what kind of performance they were to give in note form so maybe it stems from that. There are some pretty creepy moments in this film and if you've ever been camping in the middle of a dark forest, you know exactly how scary this movie can be at times. If you have to see this movie, watch it for the end sequence which in my opinion is one of the most frightening scenes in any movie I have ever seen. Watch it under the right conditions: dark lights, night time, quiet setting. I guarantee that if you watch this with no huge expectations, you will be satisfied.
RATING:***1/2 out of *****, a half a star thrown in for a genuine attempt at giving us something we haven't seen before and doing it with a bare amount of materials at their disposal.