I’m going to start talking about this movie by talking about a different movie. When The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999, it was something different. The use of the Internet to create a myth ahead of the movie and suggest that three people had actually gone missing was a big part of this, but ultimately it was the film’s conceit - that what the audience was seeing was the recovered raw footage shot by three film students in the days leading up to their disappearance. This was not what horror in the 1990s looked like, and it blew up big.
And, as is often the case, the success of The Blair Witch Project was attended by controversy, as people came out of the woodwork to claim that it plagiarized The Last Broadcast, which was, these critics would say, the real first found-footage horror film. So, as picky as I am about found-footage horror, I figured I should watch this at the very least as a historical artifact. And you know what? The claims are baseless. The Last Broadcast is barely a found-footage film. And even if it were first, The Blair Witch Project is significantly better. More to the point, The Last Broadcast is incoherent, amateurish to the point of ineptitude, and not so much poorly paced as not paced at all.
On December 15th,1995, four men - Steven Avkast and Locus Wheeler, hosts of the cable-access show Fact or Fiction, Rein Clackin, expert in paranormal sound recording, and Jim Suerd, their guide, went into the Pine Barrens of New Jersey to investigate the legend of the Jersey Devil. Then, on December 19th, Jim Suerd comes staggering out of the woods, miles away from where they started, and calls 911 because the rest of them are missing.
Two days later, the bodies of Wheeler and Clackin are found. Avkast is never seen again.
In the wake of these deaths, a documentary filmmaker named David Leigh has decided to make a film about the case and Suerd’s subsequent murder trial. The film is presented as that documentary, complete with talking-head interviews and examination of both archival footage and footage shot by the group in the Pine Barrens. Before getting into the film itself, I want to look at the idea that the filmmakers who made
The Blair Witch Project plagiarized this film. It’s important to note that neither group of filmmakers ever dignified the idea - this seems, in retrospect, like a collective eruption of know-it-alls attempting to maybe gatekeep low-budget horror, I guess? Regardless of motivation, it’s a groundless assertion.
The Blair Witch Project was already in pre-production by the time
The Last Broadcast was released,
The Last Broadcast isn’t really a found-footage film (arguably the first found-footage horror film is
Cannibal Holocaust, made years earlier), and the only thing the two films have in common is “group of people who have no business being in the woods go into the woods and meet a bad end.” By that criterion, both films ripped off
Deliverance.
But again, the whole thing is irrelevant because as it stands, even if it were true, the people who made The Blair Witch Project made a far superior film by pretty much every metric. Or, to be less gentle about it, this is not a well-made film. It’s let down by its production design, its writing, and its pacing.
It's pretty clear that the entire production is a homebrew affair. That’s not an indictment in and of itself, I’ve seen any number of really good horror films made on a shoestring budget, and this was filmed for, like $900. That is, even by mid-90s standards, insanely cheap. But…it looks it, at every step. Part of doing something well on a small budget is knowing and working around your limitations. A film that is ostensibly the last footage of a bunch of dudes who go into the Pine Barrens to look for the Jersey Devil? That’s doable for not a lot of money. So it’s baffling as to why the filmmakers chose to make the film a mockumentary with only a smattering of found-footage set in the woods. None of the mockumentary stuff is believable. It works for the protagonists’ cable-access show, which is just as cheap and amateur hour as you’d expect, but when the whole film exists at that level, it looks like you’re just watching someone’s attempt to approximate something outside their grasp. Maybe two of the interior sets (that aren’t explicitly someone’s residence) are believable. A woman tasked with restoring some highly-damaged videotape has a “studio” in what appears to be a gutted or under-construction building, complete with plastic tarps everywhere. Jim Suerd’s “child psychologist” (who, against all ethical guidelines, is happy to talk about client sessions to a documentary film crew) is introduced…examining a dog in what appears to be a veterinarian’s office. Which suggests to me that he is, in fact, a veterinarian, not a child psychologist. This entire production is being directed by a former soap opera director (whose existence in the story is never really justified), and he appears to live in a single room with random post-it notes studding the wall behind him. Maybe he’s seriously down on his luck, but it kind of screams “wellness check.” A law enforcement officer from the county sheriff’s department wears an
ATF shirt. Which is, well, a federal agency, and not a country sheriff’s department. Although he
does have a hat with “Baroake County Sheriff’s Department” on it in what appear to be iron-on letters.
It’s not just that it looks cheap, it’s also that the filmmakers didn’t do the most basic due diligence on the elements of their story either. Forensic evidence is described as circumstantial evidence.
IRC messages are apparently impossible to trace despite IP addresses being something even the most bottom-feeding script kiddie could access back then. On the other hand, their broadcast is described as being a “live Internet cable broadcast” in an era before livestreaming existed at all and video compression was still extremely primitive. All kinds of wireless Internet access tech that’s easily accessible today is handwaved into existence before the existence of commercial broadband or wireless Internet access. They’ve just got a bunch of desktop computers and video and audio gear set up in the middle of the woods under a plastic tarp without even a generator. Believability and realism are paramount for mockumentaries and found-footage films to work and nothing about this is believable or realistic in the slightest.
As poor as the attention to production detail is, the writing is even worse. Human beings simply do not talk like this. Some example dialogue:
“The magnifying glass of the prosecution’s microscope.”
“We have found bodies. We don’t know who they are or how many we have found.”
“I had heard of the Fact or Fiction murders. They were big news for a period of one year, and then like so many things in today’s fast-paced world, were forgotten.”
“Our job is to eliminate suspects based on the evidence that we sift through and that we gather. And as we sifted through and gathered this evidence there was only one suspect left at the end.”
“The tapes show a group of men going through a wide range of emotions.”
This isn’t just stagey, artificially expository language. This is some Ed Wood shit. It makes sense for some of the characters to be inarticulate, but everyone talks this way.
On top of all of this, the story and packing are clumsy and incoherent. The most violent thing that happens on screen (for most of the film) is a shove and someone half-yelling “I’ll see you at camp, man!” and this is treated as evidence that someone is a homicidal maniac. It’s barely a found-footage film, spending its entire first act in documentary mode setting up the whole situation and making a big deal about the footage they shot, only for us to be shown a few snatches of footage shot in the Pine Barrens, all of it too noisy and degraded to really be understandable (we get two people stumbling on a patch of blood, and some awkward conversation between the four of them, that’s about it) which is a fair amount of buildup for nothing. The third act bounces between the ostensible restoration of the rest of the footage (which even restored is too garbled to make sense of) and a rambling tangent about the nature of truth and how the real Jersey Devil is the media or something, climaxing in an utterly ridiculous non-sequitur of an ending that goes on far too long. There’s a reason this is consigned to historical curiosity.
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