Some supremely chilling moments, but don't expect too much

Rating: 7/10 (14 July 1999)

After hearing all the (what I now believe to be) hype about this movie, I was very excited to see the preview. While the movie was very inventive and very creepy at times, it's definitely a case of the whole being *less* than the sum of its parts.
The story line, about the recovered video of three college film students lost in the woods while doing a documentary on local supernatural happenings, is inventive and provides plenty of goose-bump inducing moments. The three main actors all do an *excellent* job, and each scene in and of itself is interesting. However, just because a scene is well done doesn't stop it from being repetitive, and too many scenes rehash something an earlier one has already covered.
The video, both hand-held and 16mm show the students increasingly getting on each others nerves as it becomes clear they are lost, and documents their terror each night when they hear unexplained sounds (and eventually more) in the woods around them. But there's only so many times I want to see them all losing it and yelling at each other. The strength of the movie is in the eerie nighttime scenes, and we could have used less of daytime bickering and more of what the movie excelled at. However each of these nighttime scenes didn't quite go far enough. They were always chilling, but never truly frightening.
I don't want to give away too much of the plot, because the mystery of what is happening, and what is going to happen is at the heart of this film. Suffice it to say that I was expecting more at the end than I got. The last scene had me gripping the arms of my chair, absolutely riveted. And then it ended. Abruptly. I think I can appreciate why the film's creators did the ending in the manner they did, but I was left wanting more.
In the final analysis, the film doesn't draw together, it doesn't cohere in the way it needs to, and that is why its individual scenes, wonderful in and of themselves, don't quite create as wonderful a movie in total.