ZOMG! You stole his idea!

The Movie: The Last Broadcast, directed by Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler
Recommendation: A lot of people who claimed The Blair Witch Project ripped it off.
Reason: As the above.

Sometimes horror movie nerds (yes, I am a horror movie nerd) just plain piss me off. When The Blair Witch Project came out, I heard a lot of hype about how terrifying it was. Lots of my 'hardcore' buddies were really blown away by the movie, and when I went to see it, it terrified me. I actually didn't sleep that night-I couldn't. I ended up barricading the door to my room and staying up with the lights on, reading. To this day, I still admit that The Blair Witch Project scared me stupid and I will probably never forget the last minute of the film. So people who claim that the movie didn't scare them at all usually get a dubious look. The people who claimed that The Blair Witch Project wholly ripped off The Last Broadcast will be getting a double-dubious look because while there are some surface similarities, it's just not close enough.

The Last Broadcast is about a couple of local-cable access geeks in New Jersey who haul The Internet, a sound guy and a psychic out into the Pine Barrens to go looking for the Jersey Devil. Only the psychic comes back, and he's charged with murder when the other guys turn up really really dead later on. The movie we watch is an attempt to find the real killer and prove the psychic guy didn't do it. I know, it sounds so much like The Blair Witch Project it's creepy, huh? The initial 'buildup' phase of the movie is repetetive and slow, with the main source of tension becoming a box of videotape sent to the guy making this documentary about the murders. In the age of CSI and its many spinoffs, I think we've all become a bit jaded by 'zoom-enhance-zoom-enhance-zoom-enhance', even when it's portrayed realistically. Therefore what I was left with was a few wonderfully atmospheric shots framing some really redundant 'reveals'.

For the two dollars I paid for it, The Last Broadcast was an okay film. It doesn't age well at all, and if they mentioned THE INTERNET one more time I was going to die laughing, but there was at least some development of mood. Blair Witch was better and scarier by far.

-132/365 down, 233/365 to go