Review – The Blair Witch Project

I guess if they’d called this “The Lost in the Damn Woods and Got No Smokes Project” they probably wouldn’t have been able to sucker as many people into paying to see it. The first few minutes aren’t too bad, and the very end would probably have been powerful stuff if the preceding hour or so hadn’t completely worn out the film’s welcome. The middle, unfortunately, plays like MTV’s “Real World” doing a version of those dumb ghost stories we all used to tell when we were kids. It’s a seemingly endless onslaught of three film students screaming at each other about how much they hate being lost in the woods and how much they all want cigarettes. Occasionally there’s a little less-is-more horror to be found, and my hat’s off to them for having the guts to keep it simple in an effects-intensive market, regardless of my suspicion that it was a creative decision motivated by finances as much as by aesthetics. But overall this is a tiresome, amateurish effort that in my opinion deserved little of the critical acclaim it received. I suppose that as long as film students have easy access to equipment and exposure to the works of Peter Watkins, this film was bound to get made sooner or later. If only it could have been later. Much later. Wish I’d skipped it