The Blair Witch Project Review
by David W Holtzen (dholtzen AT world DOT std DOT com)July 18th, 1999
For me, a movie like "The Blair Witch Project" comes along every four or five years. It is the kind of movie that leaves me shaking....with anger. Angry that I was pick-pocketed out of $8 at the door (which, it turned out, was the scariest part of my Blair Witch experience)? No, angry that I spent an unrecoverable hour and a half of my life on one of the most vapid, go-nowhere movies I have seen in a long time.
To obtain the most effective fright from any suspense/horror movie, I walked into "The Blair Witch Project" with little prior knowledge, eyes wide shut. I had not visited the movie's website, had only seen the (very interesting) trailer twice, and had heard secondhand that some critics *loved* this movie. Thus, I was perfectly (un)prepared for the horrors which I assumed would be laid out in the three filmmakers' documentary footage--the remains and the cornerstone of the docu-horror premise. What I watched instead was 90 minutes of three Gen Xers desperately trying to find sense where there was none to be found. Once lost in the woods, they puzzled over mounds of rock, suspiciously placed faggots, various nighttime sounds, and worst of all how they could walk in a straight line for 15 hours and wind up in the exact same place. Very, very frequently, with cameras pointing at each other or into the dark woods of Maryland, the twenty-something trio screamed and screamed and yelled "fuck" and "oh fuck" and then screamed some more. Suspenseful? The first time. Scary? Hardly. Annoying? Definately. Toward the end, during one of the many running, screaming, oh-fuck scenes--long after I realized this dog was going nowhere and about 5 minutes after one moviegoer in the aisle where I was sitting left never to return--I cynically wondered if the actors were screaming "oh fuck", because they realized that they had no script!
With so many fundamentals missing from "The Blair Witch Project" (I was unsurprised to learn afterwards that there was indeed no script for this so-called film!), it is not difficult to see why such an effort fails so miserably. Without character development, without professional editing (in addition to being a yawner, the damn thing was LONG even at 90 minutes), and with a film-as-you go approach, it is little wonder that the movie finds itself running away from itself.
The entertainment value of "The Blair Witch Project" comes later, long after the "I've been had" anger subsides. It's a pathetic, PATHETIC, B-movie and laughing about it will no doubt entertain and take the sting off of being ripped off. At the viewing I saw in Boston last night (July 17), the audience began its hilarity immediately, during the first millisecond of the closing credits. They laughed, they heckled, they mocked, and I can't help but wonder if they were thinking what I was thinking: I know what was in those woods in Maryland. It was P.T. Barnum.
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