Over-rated Schlock

Rating: 1/10 (17 January 2010)

When this movie came out I listened to the hype for quite a while. I've loved horror movies most of my life though I gave up on them when they sank into special-effects gore-fests and expressions of very personal paranoia in the 1980s. I finally gave this film a try when it came to a second run house in my city that charged 99 cents per ticket. One can see anything for 99 cents. When I left, the manager asked what I'd thought of the movie. He knew that I was a regular and that I liked films generally. I told him I thought he owed me at least 98 cents.
In summary, a group of young people with video equipment wander out into the woods on the Maryland/West Virginia border. To characterize their combined I.Q.'s as "super 8" would be too generous. The area in which they get lost in the woods is rural but not the Amazonian rain forest or the wastes of Siberia. Walking for less than an hour in any direction would bring them to a road, a task that is far from impossible to accomplish. Still they get lost. Once they are lost they descend into fear and get, as if such a thing were possible, even stupider. In the end the alleged Blair Witch does us all the great service of removing these self-indulgent idiots from the gene pool. The really bad news is that the witch takes about 90 minutes to accomplish that removal. She's just too darned slow.
This movie does not have the utterly misguided and endearing incompetence that make Ed Wood's films like Plan 9 From Outer Space a guilty pleasure. It's not even worth renting for the pleasure of throwing popcorn at the screen.