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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 35.17%
Worth A Look: 14.58%
Just Average: 11.23%
Pretty Crappy: 12.02%
Sucks: 27%
30 reviews, 835 user ratings
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Blair Witch Project, The |
by Wendell Walker
"This is the scariest movie you've ever seen. Maybe."

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Everybody who is remotely interested in true horror needs to see The Blair Witch Project. But will it scare the bejesus out of them? Well, maybe. It seems pretty clear now that the world is divided into 1) those for whom this is the scariest film on God's green earth, and 2) the rest of us.TBWP is a true kick in the butt for several reasons. It proves the viability of no-budget film-making, it breathes new life into the horror genre, and it's a brilliant concept. But it's mainly interesting for its bistable ability to scare the living shit out of a good portion of the audience while pulling others (a minority) out of the whole experience and leaving them wondering "is that all there is?"
I think that this is a movie that hinges critically on the audience's willingness to put themselves into the shoes of the characters. To be sure, it does a lot of work to help us along--good character work in the beginning, a fair dose of comedy to loosen us up, and putting the characters into a situation not too far removed from ordinary life (getting lost in the woods, being cold and hungry, having almost subliminal noises burrow deep into our nervous systems, not being able to suss out exactly what's going on) but which is, nonetheless, deeply creepy. The progression of the story is reminiscent of Lord of the Flies, in that as the situation becomes more and more dire, the people get stripped down to their lizard-brains and the desperation of the situation comes flying into the audience.
It is your willingness to engage the characters at that visceral level of primitive desperation that, I think, determines whether the film works for you. Get sucked in, and it's a whirlpool straight to hell. But stay outside of it and feel yourself watching a movie, and you find yourself watching a not terribly scary one.
Of course this can be said of almost any flick. But what's interesting about TBWP is how high a success rate it has and what a grip it develops on those it manages to grab. For that, credit the primitive nature of the story, the primitive nature of the filmmaking, and the raw presence of the performances. But will it work for you? It depends...In the end, it proved resistible to at least one audience member. But the shell-shocked faces in the audience, the number of people trying to gather their shit afterward, tells another story.
link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=1713&reviewer=82 originally posted: 07/26/99 18:55:45
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USA 16-Jul-1999 (R) DVD: 13-Mar-2001
UK 22-Oct-1999 (15)
Australia 09-Dec-1999 (M)
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